


Knocking On My Door and You’re Calling Out My Name But You Won’t Come In ‘til I Let You In

by Zagzagael



Category: Sons of Anarchy
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-10-15
Updated: 2013-12-14
Packaged: 2017-12-29 11:29:41
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 12
Words: 22,812
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1004903
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Zagzagael/pseuds/Zagzagael
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Season 6. Chibs is growing weary of loyalty, brotherhood, the club. He's been watching Jax and has begun to notice Tara. In ways he never noticed her before.</p><p>This fic was written weekly as S6 aired. Each chapter is a coda to that week's episode. It probably does not stand alone without knowledge of the season episodes. Spoilers through the finale of Season 6.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. I Would Feed You My Heart

[ ](http://smg.photobucket.com/user/bleodswean/media/chibstara_zps20a1c540.jpg.html)

Chibs had always been a kind of subtle observer. It was in direct opposition to how unsubtle he was in the world. The Glasgow Grin, the nasty goat, the cut, the blades, the boots, the bike, the snarl. Strange how he had been less seen and more understood in Ireland, here stateside, he was definitely seen and not understood at all. He snorted - crooked grin, one eye closed - just thinking about the dichotomies that had begun to gap his life open, an unstitched wound that was healing hard with scar tissue.

No matter.

He had been quietly observing Jax for years but now he had turned the focus of his steady gaze on her. If you studied the man you couldn’t help but see the woman, notice her. So, turning his keen narrowed gaze on Tara had just been following a lesson, researching, turning over bloody leaves, and hunkering down to get as close a look as he could. Without being seen. And the last handful of hard months had made him an ace student, learning her body posture, her facial expressions, changes in tone, the vulnerable injured look that was quickly masked with false hardness. 

All that looking, all that speculative observing, his awareness of her, had begun to simmer inside the cauldron of his blackened heart. He would wake in the middle of the night shivering like a horse rode hard and put away wet. He would pull himself upright, sit on the edge of the bed in his trollies and suck down filter-less smoke after chained filter-less smoke until his head went hazy with the nicotine and he could lie back down, curl around himself, and think of anyone else. Anyone else but her. Then he’d wake with the weak sunlight and a cigarette hangover and thoughts of her would boil over and double him up with wanting, needing, longing. In the cold bathroom, he would take a shower and jack himself to completion and let her name be whispered like the damning secret it was into his cupped hands.

Tara.

Then he would supplicate his palms beneath the faucet head and let it all sluice down the drain. Get dressed, still warm and damp, kick the bike to life and head out into a new Charming day to work shoulder to shoulder with the man who got to claim the woman he wanted more than he had wanted just about anything in about as long as he dared to remember.

***

Jax had changed, was changing. They all had but the Prince was twisting in a devilish wind, turning on the gibbet of a gallows he had built himself. Chibs wanted nothing to do with it. Not anymore. He felt a fool for having believed so fiercely in the lad. True colours were being bled out and the ground was sticky as tar beneath their feet. A lifetime of sitting at the knees of Clay and Gemma had broken the boy’s back apparently. He was bowed and shaped in the direction from which he had sworn he would never go, staggering into the mayhem.

It was making Chibs sick. Sick to his stomach, sick at heart. It was tearing him into pieces, smaller and smaller bits of shredded purpose. It was destroying him. He felt as though he were in the centre of a whirlwind, anything that could be grabbed out of his grasp whipping away from him. A maelstrom that would break them all on the rocks, haul them down into the depths.

He had tried talking with Jackie. Talking soft and steady, then he yelling loud. He had put his hands on the boy, holding back his own desire to push the young King through a wall. Shaking him like a bitch with an errant pup in her jaws. Nothing was getting through; nothing was accomplishing a thing of worth. It was all wasted effort.

So, he refocused. The new Queen pricking at him, pulling at him, dragging his attention away from all the things he had been knighted to protect. He had a new allegiance. He sat on the picnic table outside the clubhouse, swung on the swings, lay on his bike, and he waited for her. He turned his back on the table, his brothers and let himself be pulled into another world.

Her world.

He would see the SUV pull into the parking lot and he would climb to his feet as though it were a lazy effort but his blood singing in his veins. He would open the car door for her and let her smile dazzle him. Help her with the boys, follow her, push swings, set up forts, encourage consumption of milk and peanut butter sandwiches. Walk the baby, chase the toddler, and keep a hot lingering gaze on her.

And he knew she knew. He’d wait for her to watch him from the corners of her beautiful, feline eyes, then smile and shake her head. He would laugh low in the back of his throat and his heart would skip a beat as though his body were keeping score.

***

“Man,” it was Tig leaning over him, a bottle of single-malt in his hand, filling their glasses again. “Man oh man, Chibs.” He shook his head, face set in serious repose.

“You gonna keep “manning” me or you gonna spit out whatever it is you’re choking on, brother?”

It was just the two of them awake, seated at the picnic table right outside the clubhouse door. Four a.m. and keeping watch on lockdown. Fucken Irish Kings.

Tig caught his gaze and held it hard. Chibs raised his brows expectantly and downed the whiskey with a skilled toss. “Choke for all I care.”

“I see you, Filip.” He held up a long finger. “I see you, man.”

“You don't see dick, my brother.”

He leaned conspiratorially close and Chibs allowed this. Tig whispered her name, “Tara.”

And Chibs felt his heart stutter but kept his face schooled. He hadn’t, afterall, cycled up the Liffey on a bicycle. Slowly he raised his gaze to meet Tig’s accusing glance. His left hand fisted and he breathed out quietly. Tig nodded and started to speak again. Chibs cut him off.

“Don’t fucken say her name again, Tiggy.” His voice was a snake, menacing and full of venomous fang.

Tig raised both hands. “I don’t see harry tom or dick, my man.”

A long silence stretched between them and both had another half glass of whiskey.

“It’s a bad idea.” Tig again.

Chibs nodded. “Let’s say I actually know what in hell you’re on about.”

“You know,” he was whispering again. “I loved a Queen once. I did. And we got close to doing it. Stepping over, you know, a line. It’s a bad idea.”

Chibs stood, hands loose at his sides now, palms prickling, the back of his neck licking flames up into his skull.

“I see you watching her. See the way you look at her. You think no one’s seeing you but I do. I see you, Chibby boy. I see so much around here, damn. It’s crazy.”

“Fuck this noise.” The only thing he could think of in response. The bravado, the puffed up chest, the swagger. He knew he shouldn’t walk away, should sit back down, kill the bottle, distract Tig with the story about the donkey show they caught in Mexico during a long boozy weekend.

But another three drinks and he knew he would be tasting her name on his tongue, whiskey flavoured, thick and sharp and intoxicating. He could feel the edge of a staggeringly dangerous cliff, leaning into it, wanting to leap, make Tig his confessor, get absolution from the biker priest, and it was so insane that he took one impulsive step back, away. He turned and let the dark swallow him.

***

So, Jax had a hard-on for the prostitute madam. Chibs took this knowledge and it was the weight of a loaded clip in his front pocket, a lethal edge on a sharpened knife under the ball of his thumb, the detonator button flashing red.

It wasn’t anything he could actually use, though, and he knew that, but it was a catalyst. The knowledge that destroyed all the rules, the walls, the lines, the loyalty, the law. For him. He could breathe, both labored and easy. He might just be able to have something all his own. Something he knew how to care for, how to nurture, how to love.

If Jax was going to blow the whole MC to kingdom come, then he, Chibs would grab and run. If Tara wanted another life, he would find a way to carve it out of his own flesh and bone for her.

He pressed himself closer to her. Teasing in the quiet way he knew he possessed. The gentle recognition of someone else’s worth. The appreciative glance that celebrated her femininity. The casual smirking laugh that signaled his understanding of her words, her humour, her perception. And she responded. Seeking him out first, looking across crowded rooms to find his gaze, setting a hand on his arm, rubbing her knuckles down the shivering length of his spine. Smiling into the promise he was making to her.

And then, the stars aligned, the planets convened, the skies opened. It was as simple as a late night smokes run. The supermarket was closer than the corner five and dime. He hung his helmet on the handle bar, shrugged his cut into place, and walked through the wide doors. Artificial light and endless aisles of food. Might as well grab a case of beer and a bottle of booze, he factored and walked into the refrigerated aisle, mulling over choices of poison. And there she was, staring hard at a shelf of tequila.

He sidled up beside her and that concerned him. She was totally unaware of him. He felt momentarily guilty for interrupting her but did it like it was a job. “Didn’t figure you for a fan of the worm.”

She startled but it was such a small movement as to be almost unnoticeable. He noticed.

“Sorry, Tara, love. You should be more aware of yourself, you know. Your surroundings.”

“Sure, Filip. I should. Yep.”

It was a mood. “It’s like that?”

She turned to face him fully. Studying him, her gaze on his, then lingering over the scars, flicking down to his throat, ignoring the VP patch pointedly. “I’m sorry. That was rude.” She sighed.

He shook his head, wondering if she could hear his heart hammering. “S’okay.”

“No. It’s not. This isn’t me.” She cast her gaze down at her hands twisting inside one another. “You wouldn’t even believe the real me.”

She was a heart surgeon, surely she would pick up on the fact that his heart was going to burst out of his chest and flop onto the lino like a hooked fish. “Yeah? I bet I would. Believe, you know.”

“Do you want to get drunk?”

That was it, his heart stopped. 

She had clocked the change in him. Maybe her surgeon senses had finally begun to tingle. But his heart had, actually, begun beating again. Traitorous organ. He would live to see this through.

“Sure,” he said casually.

“Great. Gemma has the boys. Jax is wherever god and the devil are. And you and I are going to get drunk.”

She reached for a mid-shelf Tequila and he winced. “No, lassy. Not that.”

“No?”

He brushed past her, his arm rubbing her shoulder, and she moved up against him and matched his strides. They stopped in front of the locked glass shelf. She leaned forward and peered in. “Vodka?”

“Single-malt Scotch Whiskey. Hammer of the gods.”

She smiled slowly, then bent her face towards him, and the smile widened. Her eyes crinkled and he could not for the life of him remember the last time the world had just simply fallen away.

“Yeah. Whiskey.” She said this laughing, her white teeth showing.

He pressed the call button for a clerk, turning away from her to keep himself from tearing his heart out and offering it up to her lips.


	2. This Lonely Drunkeness That Burns

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Back at Chibs' house with a bottle of single-malt.

Outside, on the sidewalk, under the moon and the parking lot lights, her mood softened. Chib’s bike gleamed, the black and chrome lines clearly remembering the long line of noble steeds from which it had descended. It was a war horse and beside her, very near to her elbow, stood the warrior in engineer boots, denim, and leather. A trill ran down her spine and out each one of her ribs, her solar plexus trembling. It was a familiar feeling but long-forgotten until that moment.

“I want to ride,” she said.

She could feel him hesitate beside her and she turned fully to him. “Please, I can’t even remember the last time I was on a bike.”

“Ah, lass,” he looked at her for a long, contemplative moment.

Another long-forgotten but achingly familiar feeling surfaced in her and coated her skin with a moist sweat. Her thighs clenched fast and tight, her body pressed close and hard, the side of her face against a leather-clad back. She shook her head. “Yeah, not a good idea.” She turned away quickly, frowning, and pointed to the small SUV. “My ride,” she pointed at the bike, “your ride.” Then she smiled and turned back to him. “Besides, we've got this very expensive bottle of scotch you’re going to teach me how to drink. We need a table and chairs, right?” But all she could think of was a moonlit hilltop and the feel of a leather cut under her ass. She smiled at him, friendly and open and frowned at the places her mind was taking her. 

“Your place?” he asked quietly.

“Mmmm.”

“Mine then.”

“I’ll follow you. Here give me the bottle. I still can’t believe how much it cost.” She reached for the paper bag and brushed his fingertips. He didn't relinquish his hold.

“Just wait, lassy, just wait. Here, let me walk you to your car.” He stepped off the curb and, again, she fell into an easy step beside him. She moved her bag to her outside shoulder.

She fobbed the door unlocked and he opened it for her. Once inside, he handed her the bag with the bottle, nodded, and shut the door. She watched him make his way back to his bike and bit her upper lip, hard, as he swung one long leg over the seat, settled himself and rocked the heavy machine off its stand. The bike roared to life and she pulled out of the lot and turned onto the darkened street behind him. The wide suburban avenues of Charming, where she had grown up in a tract home, quickly gave way to small downtown one-way streets, hundred year old bungalows and post-war cottages fronted by towering elms and sycamores. It was late and many of the homes were unlit, dogs could be heard barking to one another in fenced backyards. She rolled down the window and let the cool autumn night air fill the car. It was a sensory overload. In front of her, she watched Chibs maneuver the bike, squinted her eyes and let her mind be filled with the rush of teenage years, the seductive lure of motorcycles and booted bad boys. The promise of adventure and the temptation of experimentation. It had been a long time since she felt that life was to be lived. She was existing. Enduring.

Chibs pulled up onto a wrecked square of lawn in front of a small cottage. She parked on the street in front, watching him through the passenger window. The tingle in her rib-cage returned and she let her body react, her heart rate elevating, her mind opening and releasing restraint. She quickly wiped her sweating palms down the length of her thighs, keyed off the car, and climbed out with a swagger that remembered her wild teen-aged years.

In the house, Chibs moved quickly, efficiently, and she was suddenly hit with the realization of how strange her being there, alone, with him, and a bottle of single-malt really and truly was. He was trying to put her at ease, make it normal, make it okay. It wasn't okay. She narrowed her eyes and breathed in deeply, holding the air in her lungs. Stale cigarette and reefer smoke, eggs and bacon, old wood, and laundry detergent. His house was small, sparsely furnished, but clean. He was neither a closeted decorator nor a slovenly bachelor. She suspected that his house might be more clean than hers right now. Domestic goddess was proving to be tiresome and endless. Days of monotonous cleaning and cooking and picking up strung together like an ugly pasta necklace. Cumbersome and inelegant and she was failing at it. She knew this. What had happened to her shiny precious life?

He pulled out a kitchen chair and with a sideways nod of his head, she sat. He retrieved three crystal tumblers and set them on the table with the bottle of whiskey. He disappeared into the living room and soft aching alternative music from his generation’s decade began to haunt the corners of the house. She reached for the bottle and leveraged out the cork. She tipped it beneath her nose and inhaled the pungent peaty smell. She closed her eyes and wanted to be transported. She just didn't know where. Or with who.

She poured out two generous half-glassfuls. And Chibs returned to the kitchen laughing in surprise. “You really do want to get damaged.”

“Well, yeah.”

He sat down and took the bottle from her. “That’s quite a bit of booze there. We might not drink all that in a single sitting, ya know.”

“Really?” She asked, surprised. He nodded. “Who is the other glass for?” 

He sloshed a small bit of amber liquid into the glass and pushed it aside with the bottle. “For those who aren't here,” he said absently. “This is strong and takes years to age. Meant for enjoying. Here.” He lifted his glass, waited for her to hoist her own, then clinked his against hers, clinked the third glass and quietly said, “To the dead.” He sipped long between nearly closed lips and swallowed. She watched the length of his throat. “Pull the whiskey into your mouth, lift your tongue and let it roll off each side and down against your bottom teeth. Breathe in the vapors of it. Taste it slowly. It’s what we call hot. Then swallow.”

She did as he instructed and her sinus cavity filled with the spicy tones of the alcohol. She swallowed and it burned in the most sensual of ways. She closed her eyes and smiled. 

“Good, right?”

She nodded at him. And sipped again. “So you don’t throw it back, like tequila?”

He mock-shuddered. “Gods, no. That would be alcohol abuse.” 

She laughed and something fell away from her, inside of her body, released its stranglehold, and dissipated. She sat back and crossed her legs prettily and leaned one elbow on the table, her hand at the back of her head, the feline shape of her body curling around itself. She watched him through slitted eyes. He was in shirtsleeves now, the cut gone. She let her hot gaze drift across the broad shoulders, down the tattooed arms, the beautiful square tipped fingers. Back up to his face and his eyes were fast on hers, warm and curious. She blushed. She was beginning to realize that she had never really paid attention to him. Not as a man, not as a husband, son, or father. Only as one of the SAMCRO brothers, only as, and at this her heart skipped, Jax’s most trusted ally now. But lately, just lately, she had begun to see him, to be aware of his presence. A casual form of friendship had begun to build between them and before tonight she would have said it was familial, sibling in nature. She looked away. 

The music and the whiskey, the warmth of the room, the forbidden adventure were all heating her from the inside out. She allowed this. She wanted to burn everything to ash.

“You like music?” she asked him, trying to affect a coolness she didn't feel. 

“I do. Time in my life it was everything. Ya know?”

“Yeah, I remember those years. I wonder why I’ve stopped listening to it.” She did remember how important music was when she was young. The soundtrack to her life. She couldn’t remember the last time she had been charmed by a song, a lyric, a voice. She sang a lot of children’s rhyming ditties and Jax didn’t care one way or the other about music or musicians. He never had. She shook her head and caught his gaze again. Questioning.

“You’ve lost weight,” she observed.

He leaned back in his chair, rocking it on its back legs, a hand on his stomach. “Yep.”

She cocked an eyebrow at him. 

“Feckin’ bleeding ulcers. Can’t keep anything solid down.”

“What? Filip!”

He one shoulder shrugged.

“You shouldn’t be drinking. Have you seen a doctor?”

“I’m seeing one now.”

She was confused as a frisson of jealousy whipped through her. “You’re seeing a doctor now?”

He nodded. “Actually, right now.” He winked at her and poured out another half glass full of whiskey for both of them.

She hadn’t noticed that she had finished the first serving but she lifted the glass now and drank deeply. Her head felt foggy, the edges as soft as cotton, and it was exactly what she had been craving earlier in the evening. A soft obliteration. She reached out a hand and grasped his wrist. He stilled beneath her fingers.

“I am the doctor.”

“Aye.”

“You should come in to the hospital and get a full work up.” 

He turned his hand under hers and her fingers ghosted his wrist. Searching out the steady pulse. She pressed lightly down between his tendon and the sharp bone, felt the vein raise itself, and her blood recognized the life force. 

“Should do a lot of things, I suppose,” he said quietly, his eyes on her fingers. “Will you be the sawbones who works me up?”

Something in the evening was spiraling out of her control. The whiskey was acting faster than any tequila she had ever had. She was becoming drunk. But this man was part of that intoxication. She squinted at him, the shape of him coming into sharp focus. Had she ever noticed how masculine he was? How expressive his eyes? How the scar on his left cheek nearly reached his ear. She leaned toward him and lifted her hand from his wrist to trace the scar with her finger. He closed his eyes.

She stood suddenly, upending the chair and he opened his eyes, a deliberate slowness to his movements. He was so in control of his body, his reactions, she marveled at the sense of calm he exuded. 

“Um, where’s the bathroom?”

He smiled and nodded, standing, “Just there.” He pointed and bent to right the chair as she made her way to the door he had indicated.

In the bathroom, she flicked on the light and looked into the mirror above the sink. “What the hell are you doing?” she asked herself silently. “What in the hell is wrong with you?” She had to look away from her own eyes.

She brought her hands to her face and she could smell him on her flesh.

When she returned, he was in the living room, on the sofa. The bottle and their glasses on the crowded coffee table. She noticed that the glass for those absent had been left behind. “Good,” she thought to herself. And then she laughed. 

“You’re in a better mood than I found you in.”

“I am, Filip. I am. I told you I needed to get drunk.”

“You told me you wanted to get drunk. Needing is something else, innit?”

She sat on the other end of the sofa. Both of them bookends to a heavy dangerous space between them, filled with unwritten novels of an illicit, betraying nature that would each surely end in bloody vengeance and oceans of tears.

“My life,” she said softly. “What the hell has happened to my life?”

“I don’t know. What’s happened to it?” He leaned forward and fished a pack of cigarettes out of the sea of paper and magazines on the table. He offered the pack to her and she shook her head no. He tapped one out, and leaned back against the sofa to retrieve a lighter from his front jeans pocket.

She watched this hungrily. His movements were full of dark grace and a feral maleness she hadn't been attracted to in years. Since Jax was a teenager. She licked at her upper lip. He dragged deeply on the smoke, settling again against the arm of the couch. The whiskey glass in one hand, balanced on his thigh. She sipped at her own drink, still watching him, and then she reached over and with a practiced move took the cigarette from between his fingers and brought it to her lips. She filled her lungs with the smoke then handed it back to him, his palm hot over her knuckles. The heat traveled up her arm and burrowed into her chest.

“Filip?” she whispered.

“Right here, Tara.”

“I need,” she paused, hesitated, could feel how very close she was on the edge of something, “I need to know who I can trust.”

He nodded, handing her the cigarette again. “We all need that.”

“I don’t know who I can trust. Not anymore.” The room had become dangerous, she felt dangerous within it. Her heart was beating very, very fast and the cigarette smoke seemed to be lifting her bodily from where she was sitting. Her belly was full of whiskey and her head was narrowing the world. Her hands were shaking in their need to reach, to stroke, to touch.

“You can trust me, Tara,” he said this quietly but with conviction and fortitude, and gaping wide open honesty. 

She could only nod in gratitude and press the heels of both her hands beneath her eyes to keep from betraying herself entirely.


	3. Shipwreck Me

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Tara breaks. Chibs shatters.

He was mustard. And he knew it. Now, he knew it. Getting up to things. And none of it any good. They were on their second shared smoke. And that was something. She wouldn’t have one of her own, insisted on lifting it from between his fingers, twice from his lips, taking a drag, watching him through the white smoke, and then handing the feg back. It was an intimacy he hadn’t shared since he’d been a kid.

He could see how on edge she was, had become, really, over the past ragged handful of months. Something was slowly tearing her into smaller and smaller pieces. His heart had been steadily rising up to her, over the weeks, because of this vulnerability he had never seen anyone wear so tragically beautifully on their face before. Down the length of each one of his vertebrae, something was shifting and it was animalistic and felt very much like fierce mate protection.

“You cut your hair.”

She nodded, self-conscious. One hand moving up to catch the ends between her fingers. “It’s short.”

“It suits you.”

“Do you think so? I don’t know.” He watched her pause, consider. “I didn’t, actually, cut it.”

This drew his attention sharply and he turned his shoulders to her. “What’s that then?” His voice was abrupt and she flinched.

“I shouldn’t tell you. I haven’t told anyone.”

“Tell me.”

She looked at him from under her long, black lashes. She had a habit of worrying at her upper lip he had not noticed before. He wanted to reach out and press his fingers against her mouth.

“These horrible women in County,” she began.

He caught his breath and held it until his lungs hurt. He suddenly remembered the first day she was out of jail, her hair a disaster, her face pale and drawn. He lit another cigarette, and waited, his foot keeping an impatient time.

“It was a power play, I guess. Showing me they had knives. That they could do anything they wanted. Anyway,” her shoulders came up and then dropped. “They cut it when I was asleep. I didn’t really sleep again after that. Not really. My hair on the floor when I woke up. All I could do was act like it was nothing. You know, like nothing but a thing, Chiquita.” Her voice trembled out of her in slangy vernacular for the last few words and he felt rage boil over inside of him. She took the cigarette, her slender fingers shaking.

He smoothed down his goatee, running his knuckles under his moustache, pushing the hairs to the edges of his lip. He could only nod. An overwhelming need to take her into his arms and comfort her was riding rough inside his head. The ends of his fingers feeling at the void. “It’s not a safe place. Right.”

“I guess….I didn’t really get that at first. I mean, I didn’t think it was sleep away camp, but I didn’t know there would be so much anger directed at me. Like, why me? And then, yeah, I got it. Everyone’s angry, everyone’s raw. So, I adapted.” She ground out the cigarette, twisting it between her fingers in her lap. “Let’s talk about something else. Please.”

“Aye.” He wanted to kill something, break something, smash things to bits and pieces that could never ever be put back together. He took a deep breath. “You going back to work?”

“I would like to, yes. But no, I don’t think so.” She pressed the sides of her fingers under her nose. “Filip, I’m going to prison.”

He watched her struggle. She had closed her eyes and he could see the line of tears threatening along her quivering lashes. The tremble in her lower lip broke something inside of him and he reached out for her, fingertips brushing her arms. She found his hands and held on tight. She was making small gasps that were hurting him and he drew her towards him. He wanted to take her face between his hands and press his mouth to hers, quiet her, but he held himself back from this, pulling her instead against his chest. She folded herself with a sob that tore through his lungs like a bullet. He couldn’t breathe.

She was fragile and birdlike. Small and thin and he wrapped his arms tighter around her, held her hard and fast. Slowly, he began to rock her as she cried. Her face was in his throat, he could feel the wetness of her tears. He could smell her hair and without thinking, only wanting, pressed his mouth down against her head. His teeth hurt for needing to bite into her flesh, his tongue ached from the desire to lick every inch of her skin.

Whiskey drunk, he was sweating hot and panting. She was beginning to cry herself empty, he could feel her boneless now, giving her body over to his embrace. And his body responded, he was getting hard. He needed more and he moved himself sideways into the couch, pulling up one knee and lifting her fully against him so that she turned and was nestled neatly between his thighs. Relief from the full contact was nearly orgasmic and his arms tightened, his fingers in the well of her spine. He simply was not going to let her go.

They sat like that for minutes. He counted time with each fucking pulse of blood in his throbbing dick. Any threat of reason or control that skirted through his mind, he pushed away. He wasn’t having it, not any of it.

Then he felt her slide her hands loose from the clench she had them in, palms pressing down the length of his ribs, feeding her hands behind his back. She turned her face further into his neck and her mouth was on his flesh and he moaned low. He could feel her teeth, her lips, her tongue.

“Sweet Jesus. Fuckin’ Christ.”

He had to stop this. He grasped her shoulders and gently tore her away. He bent his own body backwards, standing on one foot, then the other and she let herself fall against the couch. With both hands on the back of his neck, he pulled his head down hard. He moved quickly now, as far away as the room allowed. He found the wall and pressed his forehead against it, knocking himself hard, then his fists were there on the sheet-rock.

She was behind him, unexpectedly, one hand on his bicep, under his tee shirt sleeve. He turned quickly and covered her hand with one of his own. “Tara. Don’t touch me. Just don’t. Touch me. Right now. Don’t.”

She was nodding and tried to pull her hand free, but he held it fast. He reached out blindly with his free hand and she was there, close up against him. And his hand found the side of her face, then he had both hands on her face, turning her hard, her back hit the wall and he was on her. His mouth found hers and she was kissing him fiercely, violently. With a fluid movement, the long length of his body trapped her. He could feel every inch of her and his arms came down, freeing her head, reaching behind her. He needed her closer. Even closer. And she came to him, her hands on his back, pulling and pushing herself into him.

He bent his knees and slotted her between his thighs. He ground his erection hard and her hips answered. He could no longer control the motion of their bodies. He had never been so completely out of physical control with a woman. It was the same explosions of a brawl, a fist fight, his shoulders bending with the strain of violence.

Her tongue was deep inside his mouth, behind his upper teeth. Suddenly he knew he was going to begin begging. Using her name like a curse and a prayer.

“Tara,” he groaned into her mouth and she swallowed her name and smiled wickedly against his lips.

She had her hands on his buckle, pulling the leather through, then the button fly of his jeans, and she petaled the denim open and with both hands she had the velvet steel of his cock between her palms. He unzipped her jeans and pushed them down.

“Boots,” she whispered and he went down to his knees and pulled them from her feet and dragged the jeans down over her legs and she kicked them off.

He open mouthed her cunt and listened to her moan his name. She was calling to him and he stood, his hands running up the backs of her legs, pulling them up and around his waist. He reached down, fisted his cock, and slid himself into her.

He leaned forward and found her mouth again. He closed his eyes, his world shattering.


	4. The Moon She Sees Me and She Sees Me Wanting

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> S6.7 knocked me out. Entirely. And for a long moment I thought of abandoning this fic because Tara wtf???? But I've decided to carry forward and see if I can work around Sutter's betraying twist.

He couldn’t sleep. He couldn’t eat. And he couldn’t look Jax in the eye. He had never been so lovesick. Ever. And he was one hundred percent infected.

It was early days for them, and Chibs recognized this. No one even suspected outside of Tig’s short remarks about seeing him moon over Tara. But, and he reminded himself of this daily in the bathroom mirror, it was beyond crazy that Tara was even on a friend basis with him, let alone allowing him access to every single inch of her gorgeous body, and giving back just as good as she got. He woke with an achingly stiff cock every single morning and nothing would bring relief unless it was the morning of one of their unpredictable days where she would find him or let him find her and their coupling was quick and dirty and delicious. At the most unpredictable of times, he would feel a flush rise up the front of him, slicking his skin with sweat and a full body memory would open him as though it were a fillet knife and all he could do would be to stop, find a way to steady himself, and breathe through the delectable destruction of his life.

They had managed to spend a honeymoon week after their first time. He had shown up at the hospital on his bike, the pretense of the thorough physical exam she had threatened him with, and not only did he have her hands on him in an exam room, she would brave the risk and climb on the back of the bike and they would disappear for hours.

The first day had been glorious. She had told Margaret that she was needed for MC business and that he was there to take her. They had stood grinning at one another in the parking lot like teenagers playing hooky from school. Then he handed her the extra helmet and straddled the bike. His blood was singing, waiting as she buckled the chinstrap, and swung a leg over. He kicked the bike to roaring life, felt as though it were his confidante, and dipped sideways for a long turn out of the hospital parking lot. He understood the distance between them as they departed, but once on the street, she slid forward, her thighs fast and tight against his, clenching in a way that nearly had his eyes rolling out of their sockets. He knew that strength, that clench. Then her hands were around him, flat-palming him, pressing the front of her body against his back, and lying her face flat against the reaper. It really was nearly too much. At the only red stop light they hit on their way out of town, a young mother in the Volvo wagon beside them looked longingly at the two of them and Chibs grinned all tooth at her and left a bit of back tyre rubber in the intersection as he gunned the bike through. It was every fantasy he had ever had come to sharp life and he was in control of all the power.

He took her to a pioneer cemetery outside of town. It was a beautiful autumn day, crisp and the small graveyard was fenced with sycamores turned yellow and releasing leaves like wishes. He picked one up and put it in the pocket of his cut.

They walked, hand in hand, through the leaning headstones, the broken marbles. There was a row of mausoleums and they let themselves into one, squeezing through the broken iron gates. It was dim and cobwebby and the place which he would dream of for the rest of his life. They undressed one another and on the stone bench inside she made him sit, straddling him with a shy smile but within minutes he had her crying out his name and he bit the bow of her perfect collarbone and didn’t give a fuck about the mark it left. He wanted her more than he wanted anything. He wanted to mark her. He wanted everyone to know she was his. And when he arched up into her, groaning out her name, and came harder than he had come in years, he could only think to himself what a stupid bastard Jackson Teller was.

Two days later he was in the hospital parking lot again, leaning on the bike, waiting for her to find a clear spot in which to disappear and Jax showed up on his bike. A slightly surprised look flashed across his face but Chibs had too much invested to lose everything with one bad hand of cards. He straightened himself and swaggered over to the prez and allowed the male hug. Before Jax could ask, he told him he was there for a tetanus shot, had a nasty run-in with a rusty can opener and Jax laughed and said, yeah, good idea. Stay away from those can openers. Chibs followed him in to Tara’s office and watched his cool Queen maneuver herself around the two of them until Jax got whatever it was he’d come for and left giving them both a quick nod. Chibs marveled at the lies flowing like poisoned honey out of his mouth and decided that everything was justified. Every fucken thing. But that night he came awake screaming out of a nightmare in which Jax slit Tara’s throat as she lay tied to the Reaper table at chapel.

The next day she came to him. A complicated string of voicemail and he was sitting at the kitchen table in his house when she let herself in. For hours they found and lost one another in his bed. He wanted the world outside to stop turning, the sun to freeze, the oceans to dry up, the mountains to crumble, the past present and future to narrow to just the two of their bodies locked together. But it didn’t, and she cried when she left. That was the day she told him she was going to divorce Jax.

He had been rocketed into the stratosphere. It was similar to his punk rock days and his brief climb aboard the dragon, the horse, the junk and the ride that just never disappointed. Until it did. But he wasn’t thinking about the crash, refused to entertain the idea of it at all.

And when it all went to hell in a handcart, it had not a single thing to do with him.

He knew she wasn’t pregnant, although there had been the darkest moment there, just for a moment, when he had come through the door and seen her curled around herself, blood and tears. Jax had been admirable, the damn fool. And Chibs stared at the two of them on the floor and felt the tip of the knife of doubt pry a bit between the ribs that protected his heart. Just a bit before he turned on his heel and out in the hallway found the loo and vomited up his breakfast into the sink.

Late that night he made his way to her hospital room, waking her with a kiss. Slowly she opened her eyes, her mouth already smiling. She knew him, even asleep she knew him. He pulled up a chair and sat down, holding her hand between both of his, his thumb rubbing warm circles into her skin.

“Are we going to talk about this?” he asked quietly.

“Should we?”

“I think so. Aye.”

She turned her face away, swallowing with effort.

He stood and let her hand go so she could wipe her face dry. “When you’re ready, Tara. But you’ve got to know now that you can trust me. To the very ends of the earth and back. I would die for you. You know that.”

She held up her hand, palm out, fingers spread. “Please, don’t say that. Not yet. Love is killing me, but we’re not to that place yet. Filip.”

He nodded, grim. He knew he would die in a moment if it was what was required. But he knew women could be different. Could hold their love in different ways than men.

“I’ve got to tell you, doll, I’m not sure I’m understanding all of this.” He motioned with both hands.

“I know,” she said in a whisper.

“You either really don’t see any other way out of this life, or you’re the most bad-assed queen any MC has ever seen.”

“Is that supposed to be a joke?”

“I don’t know. You tell me. If it’s Queen you want to be, you know I’m your fucken Knight. You know that.”

“I do. I do know that.”

He sat back down, the slow dawning that he was not in control of any of this. He furrowed his brows and turned the black page and made himself look at what was written there in blood and tears, bone and bile. He knuckled his forehead hard and took a deep breath. He needed a cigarette.

“Filip, don’t go there. You need to trust me now. You want me to trust you and I do. More than you can even know. But please, I need you to trust me. And be patient.”

“You got no idea where my mind can take me. But right now, just now, I’m going to try to keep that door shut. Locked and barred. You need to give me something. Soon.”

She nodded. “Kiss me.”

Outside, the night was cool almost to the point of cold. He walked up against the shadows of the building, stealing down the edges of fences, one block, then another over to where his bike was parked behind a Chinese Laundry. He sat on the bike and smoked, staring at the sky and wishing he could see the stars but the lights of Charming dimmed the skies and all he could see was the moon, a blood-letting sliver of bone.


	5. Allow My Body To Drop Upon the Point of This Sword

She lay awake, her forearm covering her eyes, for hours after he left. She had strained to hear the bike, she knew the particular rumble of his custom Dyna now. Five minutes, ten minutes. And then, rising out of the small suburban nighttime sounds from the neighborhood surrounding the hospital, she heard the bike approaching. With an insane roar building to its crescendo, she listened as it tore down the avenue fronting the hospital, screaming past the building, and then it was gone, leaving metallic echoes in its wake, and she found herself crying. Again. 

Enough with the crying, she scolded herself. She rubbed her fingertips across her lips. The man could kiss and wasn’t that a surprise. Everything about him had been a surprise. 

And he hadn’t been part of her plan, in any imaginable way, and now she wished more than anything that he had been. But how could she have possibly known? Now she needed him to be, needed him to be part of the future she was slowly falling into. Cutting away at all the ties that bound her to Jax, the MC, the life she had allowed to be destroyed, the person she had become and that she had grown steadily to despise.

Jax had no way of knowing the place she had arrived at her second night in County. He would never be able to imagine the gouts of shame and guilt and horror that had bled out of her. Bled her dry. How she had thrashed on the floor of the bathroom, a panic attack so severe she actually believed her heart would pound itself to death. She imagined her body caving into the turmoil of her mind and seizing, the electric shock of it, the swallowing of the tongue, the drooling, the agony. But the guards had pulled her roughly to her feet, shook the living hell out of her, and she had come back to her senses, her teeth snapping together as the two women racked her between them. She saw the faces of the other inmates, smug and knowing. They had seen. She was weak, and she didn’t belong there, and she was pissing her orange jumpsuit in pure, unadulterated fear. Let them think that, she was fine with that assumption. The truth was so much worse. She was ashamed. Deeply, heart-wrenchingly ashamed. 

What had happened to her life? Once that horrible night had passed, she woke with only one motivation, one purpose. The boys. Her children. And her mind was made up that quickly. The ironclad will she had always possessed, and that only Gemma and Jax really knew about and even they had only seen glimpses of it, took hold of her fists and she began to rule. With that will she would destroy every single one of them and the only things left standing in the carnage would be Abel and Thomas and their futures. She made up her mind and after that everything was easy.

And yet it hadn’t been. At all. The plan was diabolical and intricately complicated. She was a perinatal heart surgeon, for Christ’s sake, intricately complex was what she did. Attention to minute detail was her fetish. But none of that microscopic focus erased the larger details. She was forced to hold herself in familiar ways, walk, talk, speak, dress, and act in ways that had come to signify to her the hair shirt of her own creation.

But then. Chibs. Before her arrest and shortly after her release, she had begun to see him. And now she knew it was because he had wanted to be seen, but during the tumultuous month she didn’t know that. Only knew that he had risen in her consciousness into a new place. The calm demeanor, the slow but genuine smile, the ready hand offered, the precise attention he paid to her. She noticed and gratitude began to build inside of her, for him, only for him. He seemed to understand her when no one else could be bothered. He seemed to be the only one who could touch her when she felt she had become the untouchable. 

He had become her Knight Errant. 

She thought back to earlier, when he had told her, “if you want to be Queen, I am your Knight.” He hadn’t said he was her King, he knew he wasn’t. And now she knew he didn’t want it. He wanted the same thing she wanted, to love, to be loved, and to find the hidden door that would let them out of the terrible dark place they had trapped themselves inside of.

 

On the far side of town, Chibs drove past the bar, but last call had come and gone. He took himself home and thought back to the last time he had been out with the boys.

Just two nights before they had been drinking in the corner of the bar at the end of the block. Their new haunt. The sweets and soda shop was several doors down, locked up tight for the night. The MC had naturally been drawn to this local hole-in-the-wall. Their presence was huge and it was only a few consecutive nights of holding court that the regulars shunted themselves out, newcomers would wander in and leave immediately. They had taken over and the barkeep kept pulling beers and pouring shots and grimacing when he didn’t think he was being watched. SAMCRO didn’t really care about the little proprietor’s feelings just as long as he kept them oiled. 

It had been a tedious day and they had tumbled into the bar exhausted and thirsty. Jax had settled heavily into a chair, his officers following suit. Fingers in the air indicated to the bartender what they wanted. 

Chibs, Bobby, Tig, Juice, and Rat were at the king’s table, other Redwood members were occupying tables and the pool table. As though called, croweaters began to filter in, high heels clicking on the wooden floors, the air permeated with cheap perfume and ridiculous giggling. A respectful berth was given to Jax’s table.

A bottle of blended whisky and shot glasses appeared, then several pitchers of beer and a mug for each. The first round of whiskey elicited a toast, and as they threw the alcohol back and reached for the beer, Chibs thought of teaching Tara to drink single-malt. A familiar heat burned through him and settled heavily in his balls. He closed his eyes and relished in it for a single moment before telling his body to step off. He glanced over at Jax who was appreciatively eyeing the ass of a new croweater as she bent over the pool table for a shot. Tig was elbowing him to it and Jax shook his head in the negative.

“Yeah, not happening. Juice, you should introduce yourself to the lady,” he said, laughing. 

Juice nodded appreciatively, then poured out another round of shots. “Not tonight. Besides, I just finished a round of penicillin. Please.”

They roared laughing and toasted std’s. Juice frowned. 

Chibs was suddenly obsessed with watching Jax. Watching the blonde King and considering him. He wouldn’t actually allow his mind to follow him into his marriage bed, but it was getting uncomfortably close. There was no question Jax was beautiful, the light to Tara’s dark, and the first years had certainly seen the pair tighter than a rusty bolt on a neglected Panhead. But all that had shifted when Jax ascended. Now with thoughts of Tara in every conceivable position in his life, Chibs had begun to sort through the years with a fine toothed comb, pulling out dirty hairs from the messy past. Jax in Ireland was one that particularly reeked of filth. Chibs shivered and pulled deep at his beer.

Bobby was jibing Jax. “I hear you got yourself a set of high-class pins just waiting to wrap around you over in Stockon.”

“What?” Jax was quietly stunned, and Chibs leaned over the table to hear.

Bobby held up both hands in apology. “Sorry, brother, if I stepped over a line.”

The table had grown quiet. Chibs watched as Jax collected himself. “Naw, yeah. You know how it is.” He took a drink of his beer. “Someone’s talking shit, huh?”

Tigs frowned at Jax. “What are you saying, Prez? It was only a cigar?”

The table roared in laughter and quieted uncomfortably, eyes cast away from Jax’s confused face. 

“I’m married, boys.”

Chibs nodded at this. Suddenly he wanted to launch himself across the table and wrap his hands around Jax’s neck.

“Fine,” Tigs continued. “I’m not and Colette is freakin hotter than my exhaust pipe after riding over to Oaktown. I’ll let her suck all the heat out of it.”

Fast as a snake bite, Jax had his hand around the back of Tig’s neck, pressing his face down into the table. “Not funny. Not funny at all. That sounds dangerously disrespectful, Tiggy boy.” His voice was a growl. Several of the other brothers had stopped what they were doing and were watching the table cautiously.

“Whoa, Jax, whoa,” Bobby was standing now, reaching over for Jax’s forearm and wrestling him loose from Tig. 

Jax let go with a shake and stood. “Gotta see a man about a horse,” he said and disappeared into the dark hallway.

Tig was rubbing at the back of his neck. “Touched a nerve, I guess. Does he not get that she’s a whore madam?” 

“Let’s just fucken change the subject, okay?” Bobby asked and Tig nodded in reply. Another round of whiskey and they waited for Jax to return.

The Prez was all smiles again, and toasted to high-class pussy and Chibs couldn’t drink to that and turned the shot glass between his fingers. The poisoned apple doesn’t fall far from the grafted tree, he drank to that instead.

“Your lady is gorgeous,” Rat said, his voice full of respect and admiration.

Jax turned to look at him. “She is. Thanks.”

“You shoulda seen her before she got all motherly,” Tigs said.

“What the hell?” Jax asked angrily.

“Man, I just keep steppin’ it it, don’t I? No offense intended, Jackson. Tara, she’s fucking amazing.”

Jax softened. “I know she is. I know it. But yeah, she’s a mother. I see the ways she’s changed. Those boys are her life. I never thought she’d leave surgery, but these kids, man, some women just become like she bears, you know?”

“She’s still a woman,” Chibs interjected and the others nodded in agreement, sidelong glances at Jax to gauge his reaction to this.

“I know that.”

The two locked eyes across the table. Chibs wanted to smash the shot glass into the other man’s temple, bury the shards in his brain. He wondered if that was in his face, because Jax’s expression clouded then cleared. Jax looked away, as though distracted by hooting and hollering behind him and Chibs knew in some way he had bettered the younger man. Chibs’s guilt had the potential to become the sword he would fall on, guilty of love over loyalty. Jax’s sins were the sins of hubris, and that was a sin of arrogance. Guilt was not one of the stakes the young King would impale himself upon. 

They killed the whiskey and lay the bottle on its side. Juice reached out and spun it and when it landed on Tig, he cornered him. “What’s the worst pussy mistake you ever made?”

They laughed, and Jax pushed the hair off his forehead and Chibs watched him decide this game was okay. “Fuck, Juice, you’re just askin’ for nightmares,” the Prez joked. But all eyes were on Tig.

“It’s not what you’re thinking,” Tig said quietly. “I came this close,” he held up his hands indicating the length of his dick, “to boning my best friend’s wife.”

“That could be a fatal mistake, brother,” Bobby said.

“Naw, you’re not getting it. The mistake was saying no.”

Chibs watched Jax consider this, thinking about Gemma and about Tara, and felt his stomach turn over. He had to get out of this game and away from the table, but Tig had spun the bottle and it was pointing at him. Of course. The devil cackled in his ear.

“You ever taste forbidden fruit, Filip?” Tig asked and his voice was lethal.

“I know you’re not talking about your ass and my cock, right?”

More laughter. 

“Let’s go, right now, big man,” Tig said sneering.

“I ain't making your fantasies come true. Besides, once you go Scottish, you get a taste for haggis.”

“That’s some promise,” Juice teased.

“Only the truth, little brother.” He finished his beer.

“You didn’t answer the question, Chibs,” Tig said and motioned for another bottle from the bartender, keeping his eyes firmly fastened on the scarred biker.

“Answer the question, mmmm. Let’s see. The answer is yeah, I have tasted it. Swallowed it down like it was the fucken sea and I was a drowning man.”

They were quiet now, all looking at him, waiting. He got up from the table. Trying to find his swagger. Tig had a nasty look on his face and for a moment Chibs thought they might have to go a round. But he reached out, spun the bottle and watched as it landed on Ratboy. He braced his hands on the table, leaned over, and said low and conspirational, “I gotta call it a night, but tell these fine men,” he pointed to a croweater seated at the bar, “about that bit of shaved bird and the double dick action I walked in on a few months back.”

Juice groaned. “Oh man, you just did not.”

Chibs grinned at him, and nodded to Jax. “Brothers,” he said and turned away.

Out on the sidewalk, he took a deep breath, lit a cigarette, and regretted deeply the last ten minutes. He began walking to his bike, and his fingers reached up to the chest pocket of his black tee. He rubbed at the outline of the pay-as-you-go, hidden there against his heart, as though it were a lucky charm. If Jax was here, then Tara was just a phone call away.


	6. Pawning My Soul

The day after Tara came home, the pay-as-you-go vibrated against his chest and he walked away from the group of them standing in the alley behind the sweets shop. He watched Tig watch him go and felt a small rage grip him. He had cut men with less anger. He raised an icy eyebrow and Tig looked away. 

Around the corner, he fished out the phone. The simple message was perplexing. Nasty and urgent. He thought she might not be in the best of head spaces after she knocked over the first domino, but he wasn’t sure what the voice-mail signaled. In an uncharacteristic rush of frustration and guilt he thought to himself that if it was punish fucking she was after, Jax could punish her himself, she could bleed herself clean on him. The thought ripped through him with the ragged destruction of a rusty blade and he winced. 

Two ravens cawed at him from a telephone pole across the street. He looked at them, certain they were omen-foretelling. He had superstitious blood running thick and dark in his veins. Aeons of Gaelic dead behind him, whispering mysteries and secrets into his ears. He could feel the coldness of their lips on the bent edges of his ears. He believed in ghosts and hauntings, portents and omens. He believed the heart was a thing that could be weighed, heavy or light dependent upon the burden it bore. He could feel the staggering weight of his own heart, a man-made anchor, pulling him down into depths he simply would not survive. Black waters closing over his head, sharks with enormous teeth of betrayal, deceit, dishonesty tearing him to shreds.

It was all fucked. Every last bit of it. His life. Her life. The club. Brotherhood. And most of all love. 

“Ye can have it,” he called to the black birds that were silenced by his voice and they cocked their twinned heads looking at him, thought and memory waiting to fly back to the shoulders of a god. “Take it from me,” he whispered under his breath, “please.” 

The alley was empty, the lingering smell of smoked grass on the air. He let himself back into the building, the boys were downstairs, and he walked as though his steps were in time to the executioner's heartbeats. He could hear Jax and that explained the vm. They nodded to one another, he couldn’t look at him, couldn’t look at anyone. He hauled himself backwards up onto the counter, leaned over his knees and breathed in deeply through both nostrils. He pushed all the oxygen rich blood he could up into his skull until his thoughts dissolved, thinner and thinner, luminescent scraps of guilt and love, longing and revulsion. He breathed out and his mind went blank, the edges blurred out. Suddenly he wanted to get completely chemically altered, wake up on a bathroom floor in a flat he hadn’t thought of in decades.

A goose walked over his grave and he shuddered as the chill ricocheted up his spine. He was going to die for love. Or kill for love. Or be killed by love. 

***

She had, apparently, come looking for him. He and Jax walked into the building and Bobby had told the prez he had just missed her. Chibs bit his upper lip, narrowing his eyes in thought. He was clever and he was fierce, but he wasn’t book smart and he certainly wasn’t cunning. He had no way of following the bloody crumbs she was spilling out of her pockets. And even if he could, he no longer knew if she was trying to find her way home or move deeper into the woods.

He was beginning to lean into a dangerous wind filled with howling voices screaming the obvious at him. It was Queen she wanted. To rule with her small iron fist. It made no sense, not when taken with the things she had told him, her fears, and her guilt, what she wanted for her children. But when he laid the obscuring vellum map of what she had done over the graphic black and white images of their two bodies joined together, the compass began to spin wildly. They were lost entirely. Map or no map.

An unpredictable visit to the temp clubhouse. It was concerning.

Jax left for the hospital daycare. Chibs declined an invite to the bar. He took his bike on a long ride out of town. In the morning, he woke, cold and as alone as he’d ever been, on the floor beside the stone bench inside the mausoleum. 

His cut was balled beneath his head for a pillow and he rolled onto his back, fed himself a smoke, kicked an ankle up onto his bent knee and stared at the cracked seams in the arched ceiling. Life was short and life was long. He’d lived through both tickings of the clock bomb. Just past the halfway point now and he had begun counting backwards and it was alright. He thought about his life.

 _No Regrets_ was an easy philosophy when you surrounded yourself with others who held to the same. It was both permission and absolution. Regret would be a gut shot, slow miserable certain death. He had chosen to live by the sword, no one had forced the blade into his hand. At least not once he was of an age. There was no sense laying blame on anyone, it did no good regardless and he was fast to move away from anything that sounded even remotely like it. Solving problems with black and white solutions made life understandable. He had been born too late, knew that Bezerker blood ran high in his veins, that somewhere in all his evolutionary yesterdays someone who had worn his face had stepped off a dragon boat onto greener land and began hacking folks to pieces. That thought gave him comfort. And a kind of tacit permission. He was a warrior, a soldier, an outlaw down into the very marrow of his bones and he wasn’t going to apologize for that to anyone. If the world couldn’t abide by him and his dangerous DNA then the world had ways of ridding itself of such. So, he lived his life in black and whites, in masculine platitudes, and with convictions that on some days felt like manacles and on other days felt like wings. 

Now, this. Hate was pretty simple, love could be intensely complicated. And he wasn’t a man who liked complicated things. But he recognized that something in the kind of man he was, his desire to serve, his need to belong to a brotherhood, had brought him to the very place he was now feeling so trapped in. That was the complicated part that he just couldn’t seem to sort. Of all the women why this one? Of all the women involved with men, why this man? 

He finished the cig and pressed the heels of both his hands into his eyes until he saw stars. He needed to be able to get straight with himself. He needed to know if it was remorse or shamelessness that he felt. He could live for love, would die for love, but he couldn’t live with and wouldn’t die for regret.

***

In town he came up on Jax, Bobbie, and Juice at an intersection. He flipped a bitch and followed them to the end of the next block. Riding up hard beside Jax, he idled the bike as the lights switched from red to green to yellow and back to red.

They were shouting over the rumbling sound of their engines. They were on a mission and fully staffed. He could see the shades of concern in the eyes of his President; they had had no idea where he had gotten himself to.

He nodded them on their way, turned and headed for her house. 

In the street, he swung a leg over and sat on the bike, dialing her number. She answered on the first ring and then he heard the door shut and he turned his head to see her making her way towards him. He stood and stayed standing beside the front tyre of the bike, one foot up on the kerb.

“What are you doing here?” she asked, her eyes betraying her.

“I don’t know.”

“You don’t know? You can’t be here, Filip. We both know that. You do know that, right?”

Her energy was vibrating off her and washing over him in waves, drowning him. 

“We could have taken the boys, disappeared to Scotland. Canada. Alaska.”

She bit her lip, her brows furrowed deep between her eyes. “No. We couldn’t.”

He raised a brow. “Aye?”

“Filip, that wasn’t even a choice when I set all of this up. None of this,” she indicated the two of them, “was real when I began making plans. Maybe things would have gone different. I don’t know, but I don’t want to be on the run the rest of my life. I couldn’t live like that. I can’t be looking over my shoulder.”

He was holding his breath and hadn’t realized it. Light-headed, his ears filling with cotton. “You’re looking over your shoulder right now.”

“I know that.”

“I don’t even need to look over my shoulder to know I’ve got a gun pointed at the back of my head.” 

She had begun to cry. “We can’t do this here. Please don’t do this here, FIlip.”

“What is it? What is it that we’re doing?”

“I asked you to trust me.”

He nodded, his tongue deep in his cheek. “I trust you. I told you I don’t get what this is, or where you’re taking it. But I trust you, Tara.” He looked at her. “It’s me I don’t trust.”

“We can’t do this here.” Her voice broke.

He wanted to take the impossible step across to her, take her in his arms. Pull her face into his neck. He wanted to lay in wait and ambush every single person who could bring her harm. He wanted to declare his feelings to her. He couldn’t remember a time when he had been filled with so much wanting, longing, needing. It was a boiling poison. 

He ran his palm down over his mouth, pulling at the goatee. “You let me know where we can do this and I’ll be there.”

He climbed back on the bike. It was a mechanical sin-eater. He gunned it so hard he popped the front wheel off the tarmac, he leaned forward into the handlebars and opened the throttle wide and the bike fishtailed. He held it open, screaming down the small suburban street. He didn’t care. About any of it. He was pawning his soul.


	7. Crawling Broken at the Bottom

It hurt to be on the outside of her. He wondered if this was the same pain, the same kind of pain, that Jax was feeling, had been feeling. When he dared to look into the small mirror in his bathroom, he saw the same sick circles under his eyes that Jax bore. The thought of sharing a burden with Jackson was a dangerous thing, a deadly sharp danger, and he had to dull it by considering that he could return, Jax would not be allowed. 

But for now he felt banished. From her queendom and he was crawling on the floor.

Nothing to do but carry on, move forward, drag his belly through the dirt, find himself in the worst possible moments slavering for her. He would suck each one of her toes into his mouth if she would only allow him to. 

Breathing was easier if he was smoking, so he upped his intake to two packs a day. It was a conscious act, in, out, inhale, exhale. Then, standing in a 7-11 of all places, he hearkened back to a hard year in his youth and he put the pack of filterless Camels back down on the counter and had the turbaned clerk sell him papers and two pouches of tobacco. Standing out on the kerb, he let his fingers recall a time long gone and he twisted a hand-rolled expertly and in moments. It felt good between his lips and he lit it and the pungently strong leaves rolled smoke off the end of the cigarette blunt like scrollwork and he squinted one eye against the burn and wondered why he had been hit with random remembrances from decades long gone. It had to be Tara, the exquisite freshness of how he felt about her. It was as if all the black blood had been drained from his veins and his heart was pumping sweet red nectar through his entire body. He felt new. Alive.

It was stacking up to be a crazy week. He could be as self-indulgent about the lovesick agony that had him by the short hairs as he wanted, but work was still work and shite needed getting done. He had to square his shoulders and wade into the fray. He divided his mind into two distinct sides. One was clearly the MC. Expectations that he was obligated to fulfill, needs that had to be met, responsibilities that he had sworn at gunpoint. The other was filled with shadows. Undulating body parts, fingers in his mouth, dark red broken blood vessels sucked in circles into the hinges of his elbows, a long tight muscle that ran from the back of her knee upwards and how the width of his bite measured the length of it. Her soft cries, his name in her voice, the sound of their matched panting breaths. 

This was how he was navigating the world. 

Church and a vote that would have had him downing tums like cross-tops, but there was a promise in the bold suggestion that Tara could be saved. He had had to stare at each one of his black-lined fingernails, the deeply lined knuckles of both his hands, to keep himself in check. Yes, yes, yes. Save her. It was something he shared with Jax. He knew that neither one of them could accept the truth of what would happen to their Queen if she had to return to jail. Chibs had refused to even consider it after the first night she had broken down in his arms. It was not to be considered. If he had to slay a million dragons to pull her across the bloody moat, he would do it. 

***

Finally, the silent phone vibrated against his chest. It had been still for so long that he was zapped by it, a pacemaker, thrumming his heart back to life. Jax had disappeared after a phone call of his own. He himself was supposed to meet up with Tig at the temp clubhouse, but he pulled over to the side of the road. The bike quiet and leaning heavy on one leg. His booted foot down on the tarmac, rooting him to the earth and all the treasures hidden beneath her rocky surfaces. He pulled the phone out and managed to answer it in time. Her voice, hushed and frantic, urgent and frightened, spun through the airwaves.

He gunned the bike back to life.

She met him at the door. He saw her see his bike in the driveway over his shoulder, saw her be okay with that. Then she reached out her hand and he pulled his gloves off, stuffing them into his back jean pocket before taking her hand in his. She dragged him into the house. She was shaking. He shook his hand free and pulled her into his arms. 

“Shhh,” he shushed her. Rocking her against his chest, his arms were tight and growing tighter. Her hands were clasped tightly between them but soon he felt her breathe out. “Good, that’s good.” Then her hands were around his waist and she was holding on.

“It’s all coming apart,” she said. 

He nodded against the side of her head. Of course it was. 

“Tara,” he began but she pulled back in his arms, looking at him, her eyes narrowed and serious. She shook her head no, be quiet, and then she reached up and took both his ears between thumb and finger and pulled his mouth down to hers. He could feel her need, her hunger, and her desire for oblivion. He kissed her as hungry as he had ever been. Then he reached down and scooped her up, her legs around his waist, her arms around his neck. He walked into the kitchen where he set her down on the counter top. He moved between her thighs, hands methodical, the thin leather belt, the hidden zipper in the woolen slacks, the thong. She unbuttoned her silk blouse and he bent forward, his mouth to her breast and she arched up into his lips. She was humming her need for him into his hair, into the top of his skull, and it was vibrating down into his spine, tremoring into his jutting hip bones.

He reached underneath her and gently coaxed the expensive trousers from beneath her body. She had his belt undone, the jeans pushed down. She hooked her heels behind his back and pulled him to her. She reached down and took him in her hand and he pulled the thin material of the thong to the side and she slid forward. His eyes closed and he pressed himself inside her. He could not move for wanting her, he could not breathe for needing to crawl inside her body. He spanned both hands across her ass. 

She had her hands on his face again, just their tongues touching. She was still humming a kind of love sex love song. He could feel how fiercely she was on the edge. They were both going to fall, tumble into the black abyss. But for that moment, before they hit the ground, he would guarantee that she would feel fucking wings burst out of her back. He reached up and cupped both her breasts through the lacy bra, his thumbs brushing her nipples with a precision he knew she could not resist. And her voice broke free, singing his name, she grabbed his upper arms, holding on as though for her life, and bent her body backwards offering him everything. He felt her rising, and she took him with her. 

Then they fell, tangled together, winged, tumbling from the heavens into hell.


	8. Dream Like a Queen While I Stand Guard

A gun on her lap and a baby in her arms. Where had everything gold turned back to lead. Hour after dark hour to contemplate each and every minute after she had consciously or subconsciously immersed herself back into Jackson Teller’s world. Family, love, blood, hate, child, children, loss, gain, death, marriage, infidelity and betrayal. She had moved through every possible stage of life made available to her in less than six years’ time. Some things she took credit for others she did not. She had not felt safe in Colorado but the place she was currently occupying closed around her like a deathrow cell. Jax had called her out once on being a runner. And right before she finally gave in to sleep and lay down she wondered at the psychology of playing different roles dependent upon who you were standing across a room from. Jax, Abel and Thomas, Wendy, Margaret, Gemma. And Filip. Of all the changes she had made or been forced to make in this life, Filip was the only one who seemed to want to truly see her free and happy. She knew they were in the throes of early love but he suited her in all the ways that no one else in her chaotic world did, they fit together, he wanted nothing from her that she didn’t want from herself, he did not want to overpower her or diminish her. If anything, he wanted to peel back the worn out skin and dry her new flesh with his breath, he wanted to see her ascend and become more than just a promise of who and what she could be.

When she awoke, alone, in the morning she thought her heart might beat itself to death. She was addled, dreams of Filip disorienting her, a looming emptiness in her arms panicking her. She walked but every cell in her body was screaming at her to run. In Abel’s bedroom, she could breathe. She realized she was no longer afraid for the boys, she was afraid for herself but that was bearable.

Then Jax handed Thomas to her and left her. Everything was destroyed. How had she not known that her motherly instincts to protect would be seen as exactly the same as Cameron’s need to damage. Her desire to nourish the boys would be the same in Jax’s eyes as wanting to steal them away from him, cut through the flesh and blood that bound him to his sons and leave him with a gaping wound that would never heal. 

Nothing that had seemed to made sense just weeks earlier was making sense now. She had no counsel; no guidance but her own wrecked hand, trembling as she pointed in the direction she wanted to go. 

After Jackson had left with his obscenely stuffed backpack, his indication that he was gone for good but quietly, deadly quietly, telling her that she would be watched she had felt despair rise up over her head. She closed her eyes, pulling Thomas tightly against her. She seated him in his highchair and as she turned to begin his breakfast she felt the wave break above her and she was swept up in a body memory of her and Filip the evening before. In the kitchen, on the counter, dim lights from the hallway outlining his shoulder and the side of his head. The subtle but precise ways he approached her body, his need to take her to a higher place, his reverence that she had found over the weeks that she actually needed. 

She stood in the house that had never felt like home, with a cramping pain she realized that no house had ever been home for her. She was the ultimate nomad, the runaway. But for now with Thomas in his chair, Abel asleep in his tiny bed, Jax long gone, and her body warming with a thin sheen of sweat at the remembrance of her lover, she made a decision. The world had always been full of shadows and human monsters and she had been running to hide all of her life. She had to stand still now, had to find safety and comfort in a hearth of her own making, inside of herself. She had to face down the monsters and illuminate the shadows. She had to forgive Jax for not being able to keep her safe. She had to turn to the only man she had ever known who wanted to nurture her. She had to come home.

In water that was deeper than she was tall she could line her pockets with the weight of her family, the consequences of her decisions and descend choking. Or she could let this man reach down and find her hand and pull her up above the depths. 

***

He knuckled the hard bone in the middle of his chest and held his breath through another burning pain. The heartburn of the past week had become chronic, probably fatal, he mused. His chest stung from the inside out, each one of his ribs as though an iron in the fire of his heart. He’d finished one bottle of antacid, had begun drinking milk by the litre, and had even tried a pack of filtered American Spirits in the hope that a gentler tobacco would ease his lungs. He wondered if this was the shape his betraying love would take, spontaneous combustion. Immolation, incinerated by knightly passion for the woman he served. 

They were walking into Diosa, looking for Jax. And they found him, the wee bad boy with his whore substitute mommy. It was sickening and Chibs felt his face harden and close. Tara was two towns away, crippled by regret and amputating parts of her life with recrimination and here was Jax on the heels of a working prostitute. He was relieved to see Gemma hone in on this at once. He sat as directed in Collette’s office and ground his fingernails into the palms of both his hands.

And then the amazing admission of all of Tara’s machinations and Chibs thought his heart would stop. He caught his tongue between his molars, his jaw grinding down hard enough to make him squint and he listened to Jax confess Tara’s sins as though she were relegated to status of outsider. He watched Gemma open herself to her son with gratitude and relief and he felt a scream building inside of his body that would rend their tissue thin world apart. Where was all her preaching gospel of family now. Subjective bitch. He hated Gemma in that moment more than he had ever hated anyone in his life. If Jax had thrown Tara under the wheels, it was Gemma who was determined to smear the mother of her grandchildren into blood and guts and pulp on the tarmac. 

He realized that there was no possible way on the fiddler’s green earth that he could volunteer to watch Tara. He thought West was the best choice, but then Juice spoke up and that was okay, too. 

His pulse raced as they left to meet Galen. Had he missed the only opportunity that would be open? Should he have found a reason to return to Charming, grab her and the boys and go? Was this the only tiny window they might be able to crawl through. He had to tamp it down and carry on or he would go insane and with knives strapped to his chest and a loaded .45 on his hip that kind of crazy fury would be lethal.

 

Of course a shite day became worse. For all of Jackson Teller’s vocalizations about cleansing the club, purifying their intent and purpose, the boy seemed to be contaminated by death and destruction, tears of blood, and screams of rage. Everything he touched turned to poison and he forced it down the throats of those he claimed to honor and serve. His love was toxic. Bleach poured down the gullet.

Back at Diosa and Chibs had to sit on the bike for long moments, the weight of it on his right leg, his left foot above the kickstand, turning things over and over in his mind. Willing his heart to a rhythm that was steady and true. He couldn’t stand the fact that they were back where they had started. The young king sporting a hard on for Collette as though he were a buck in rut. Chibs had moved into a place beyond words, beyond comprehension. Jax had a Queen, a woman above all woman, and yet he was drawn to this glamoured witch as though he could not see her for what she was. If he was going to bed this woman and behead the true Queen then they were well and truly lost. The kingdom would sink beneath the surface of the ocean and rot on the sea floor. 

Inside, their lecherous King was all smirking camaraderie, telling them to unwind, issuing proclamations of the dawning tomorrows. Chibs felt his phone vibrate and left them all to it. In a downstairs bathroom, he took the call and it was Tara.

He listened to her broken voice curl into him across the miles. Juice had told her, he had given her the address and she wanted Chibs to guide her. “Come then,” he said into the phone. “Do it. Aye.”

And he wandered back out into the posh false luxury of the brothel, sat down and waited. If he could have gifted her with anything it would have been the gift of ferociousness. 

Later, after all the shouting and all the crying, the madam walked past him. He reached out, she stopped as she always would for a male hand, forever hungry for the male gaze, and she let him look at her face. It was a tell, it was a sign. It was a punishing mark left by a fierce woman. And he grinned with lips closed to cover his feral fangs, lupine canines dripping, his MC cut hiding his rising hackles. 

He was wulfguard to his queen. 

***

He had seen many men reduced over the course of his lifetime. Most of those just in the past five years alone. Clay, Juice, Jackson. But seeing the woman he loved and admired above all people coming apart in pieces in front of him was a kind of slow death. He had to close his eyes and fill his lungs with air, he felt as though they were drowning, twisting together beneath black waves.

He reached out and took her hand, leading her slowly into the bathroom. One of the best parts of his post WWII cottage was the eight-foot long claw foot bathtub. He closed the commode lid and urgerd her to sit. Then he pushed the shower curtain back on its overhead ring rod and turned both faucets until the water was just the right mix of hot and cold. He reached under the sink for a box of soaking Epson salts and poured in a liberal amount. Then he reached up for a bottle of shampoo and squeezed some beneath the rushing water and it bubbled aromatically. He turned back to her and began to slowly undress her. She seemed so fragile to him, he wondered if her skin would flay off beneath his fingers. He leaned forward and kissed her full and gently on the mouth. 

“Oh, beautiful girl, be strong. Be fierce.”

She nodded beneath his lips. 

“Here,” he said and helped her back to her feet, her blouse and bra on the floor, he unbuckled her belt and pushed her pants off, then her trouser socks, and she stood naked and shivering. He took her hand and helped her into the tub. It was fuller than he had ever had it and he screwed off the taps with one hand and let her use the strength of his arm to lower herself into the bath. 

He hunkered down, she would not let go of his hand, but she lay her head back against the rolled edge of the porcelain tub and closed her eyes. It reminded him of his mother closing her eyes for the final time in hospital and he felt his stomach cramp with pain.

“Tara,” he said, his voice brusque and she opened her eyes and looked at him. That was better and he let out a breath he didn’t know he was holding. 

She smiled at him, small but it warmed her eyes slightly and he felt relief wash through him.

“Filip.”

He nodded. “There’s a Viking saying.”

She was looking at him, serious, open. _Tell me the answers to all the questions_ she seemed to be begging of him.

He nodded. “A Berzerker saying that goes ‘It's better to stand and fight because if you run, you’ll only die tired.’”

“Mmmmm,” she murmured, closing her eyes again but this time the corners of her mouth curled up into a smile.

He let her soak until the water was tepid. Then he wrapped her in the only towel he owned and carried her to bed. He lay her down like an injured animal, pulling the bedding up around her thin shoulders, tucking it along the edges of her body, kissing her forehead, then her mouth, then her ear. And he went out into the kitchen, returning with a kitchen chair, settling himself into it, one socked foot up on the mattress, and he watched her drift into sleep. He wished royal dreams for her.


	9. This Bloody Wreath a Crown

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Chibs is empowering his Queen. Spoilers through S6.11
> 
> For Inaccessible Rail. XO!

She woke from a sound sleep, slightly panicked, not remembering where she was, surfacing out of the depths. But the resting had begun to heal her. Where was the healer? She slitted her eyes open and saw Chibs sitting on a chair beside the bed. She recognized the sparse bedroom, the tattered pair of flags, the Saltire and the Tricolour, acting as curtain, dark against the evening sky outside. She breathed in deeply, the smell of him on his sheets, cigarette smoke hanging in the air. His head turned, towards her, outlined by the light on in the hallway, and he stood slowly, stubbing out a cigarette in the ashtray on the floor.

“Filip?” she whispered into the gloaming.

And then he was there, beside her, lying his body down next to her body, opening his arms and she burrowed into his embrace as though she were a child waking from a nightmare.

“Right here, Tara, right here, luv,” he answered her, one hand on the back of her head, pulling her face sideways against his chest.

His heart thumping inside his chest. “Too many clothes,” she said, her voice echoing into the place behind his ribs where she could hear his heart beating.

He laughed, the sound low and warm and nodded against the top of her head.

She looked up at him and was suddenly overcome. In the evening darkness of his bedroom, the feel of his arms around her, nestled as close to him as she could get, the sound of his easy laughter, she realized she felt safe, protected, but more than any of that she felt loved unconditionally. He had no conditions, no expectations. His was affection without limitations. There was unevenness between them, an imbalance, altruistic love that she had never known she needed. A kind of male wanting that she would have never guessed could complete her. She recognized this internal shift, the totality of his love, and she made a mental note in her formidable mind to examine it fully, to render a truth from it that would guide her choices, her movements, her life. But in that moment, his arms tight around her body, naked in his bed, his dark eyes shadowed, she realized that he was empowering her. Fierce power.

She loosened herself from his arms, going up on her knees, gently pressing him onto his back with her palms fast on both his shoulders. She knelt above him and pulled his black t-shirt up over his belly, over his nipples, one hand under the shirt and out his collar, circling his throat with her thumb and fingers. She leaned forward and licked a hot line up the center of his body, holding him down by his neck. She pressed his head back with her fingertips and bit one of his nipples hard. He groaned. With both hands on his back, the wings of his shoulders, she pulled him up and dragged the shirt off over his arms and head. He reached for her and the span of his sweating palms on her back branded her. She was heating up from the inside out, she was burning for him, reaching for the control he wanted her to take. With her mouth, she forced him down onto his back again, laving from his collarbones, up the length of the thick tendon in his neck, biting the sharp edge of his jaw, running her teeth from one ear to the other then back and finally finding his lips and pressing her tongue deep into his mouth.

She straddled his hips, grinding down rhythmically, both hands on his jutting hipbones. He arched up into her, between her thighs, with masculine strength that had her biting her lip and moaning in heated anticipation.

“Can I take these off?” he growled, both hands reaching beneath her for his button-fly.

She hushed him with another kiss, tilting her head sideways and licking deep out of the corner of his lips, following the line of long scar on his left cheek and tracing the conch whorls of his ear with the tip of her tongue, pulling the curling edges into her mouth.

In the cradle of her hips, he was moving, leveraging his back off the mattress with his broad shoulders, pushing the jeans down. She heard the change in his breathing and she sat back, haunches on his thighs, and smiled at the predicament of his erection and the buttoned jeans. She bent forward and open-mouth licked a hot stripe beneath the waistband and took the material in her teeth and fed each button out of its button hole with one hand. Commando, of course, and she deep throated him as he frantically pushed the jeans as far down his legs as he could reach.

She sat back and pulled the jeans off, dropping them over the side of the bed and looking at his knees, his ankles, his feet. She moved in between his open thighs backwards and behind her he reached for her waist and had begun to hum something to himself that she couldn’t understand and she lay down with both hands wrapped around his lower leg, kissing and licking the thick dark hair of his calf, the hairless skin of the sides of his foot, the prominent ankle bones. She kissed the deep arch, feeding fingers between his toes and behind her he began to tease with his own fingers and she had to close her eyes and rest her forehead on his sharp shin bone. Turning, she crawled back up the length of his body, knees on either side of him. He was completely in shadow now, sharp angles and shapes only.

Slowly she fed her thumb between his lips, he sucked hard at it, biting into the tapered bone at her knuckle, and she fed another finger into his mouth and then with a movement slick and wet and open she had him inside her body. Knife and sheath. And she bent herself backwards, crying out his name. His fingers digging deep bruises into the soft flesh above her hip bones, a belt of broken stretch marks there.

He moved in perfect time with her, answering each demand of her hips. She was climbing the cresting wave and she wanted to take him with her, all the way to the foamed and curling ridge. She reached down, bending forward, and wrapped him in her arms, pulling him back up with her and he was so strong, and so willing to serve her. He sat up, his arms around her waist, her name falling from his lips like drops of water. She crossed her ankles behind him. They moved together as though they had been perfecting this exact joining since the beginnings of time.

His mouth was at the base of her throat and she could feel his lips, the hair of his goatee. Her hands were on his shoulders, the muscles bunching beneath her palms. She leaned back, giving her full weight over to his hands. He lowered her to the mattress, between his thighs, and then he had his elbows beneath the backs of her knees and she laced her legs up over his shoulders and invited him again into her embrace. In a pose of absolute devotion, his hands flat on the bed, his chin in his chest, he was chanting her name. She let her head fall back over the edge of the bed, eyes closed, mouth gaping open, tongue running over the bow of her own lip. Her hands found his forearms in the dark, holding on tight.

They had crested a wave, crashing upon the beach, sand of beaten bone. He lowered himself to her, between her thighs, coaxing her legs down around his waist, one arm circling the backs of her shoulders.

He followed her back into the sea.

 

Out in the street, it was still early evening. They were wrapped in one another’s arms, whispering.

“Thanks for the bath. For the nap. I needed that.”

He nodded against the side of her head. “Aye. You did.”

“Tomorrow-“ she started but he took her face in both his hands and kissed her, lips closed.

“No. Shhhh now. Be quiet.”

“Please, Filip, please god be safe.” She couldn’t read his eyes in the dark but he kissed her again.

“If you need anything. Anything.” His voice was a promise.

“I know,” she answered him, quietly, finding his hand and squeezing his fingers. She turned and climbed into her car. He stepped back up onto the sidewalk and she pulled away, watching him in the side mirror. She could barely remember the fear and pain she had arrived with. He had stripped her bare and when he re-dressed her she was clothed fresh.

In her own driveway, she berated herself for feeling surprised at seeing Jax’s bike. Another bike she didn’t recognize was beside it. In the house, Rat had been on the couch watching tv with the sound turned off. He had jumped to his feet when she opened the door and walked in, hand on a gun handle inside his cut. She shook her head, she was past this. Down the hallway, she stopped at Abel’s room, sleeping, then Thomas’s room, asleep, and in her own bedroom Jax was sitting on the bed, his pack beside him, staring at his hands. She stood in the doorway but he didn’t look up and it was a pointed rejection. She turned and walked back into the baby’s room, shut the door, and lay down on the futon, curling around her body memory of Chibs. She wasn’t tired anymore but sleep was the only safe place for her in this house. She closed her eyes and welcomed the unconscious passing of time.

***

He had to get his head in the fucken game. The slightest distraction had his body slicked with sweat, his fingers curling into his palms, his tongue searching out her flesh. He was in so over his head but something had shifted last night. She was finding her power, it was her sea, her ocean, her shore they were on. If he was going to be wrecked upon the rocks, drown in the salted water, sink to the sandy bottom, he took comfort in knowing that it would be her waves that would rock him.

He had slowly, over the months of watching her, over the weeks of loving her, come to see his role in her life. He was acting catalyst to a maturity that had been eluding her. He was helping her to shed the last vestiges of an immaturity hiding the true glory of who she was, what she could be. At first, he had wanted to rescue her, save her, take her away from everything and hide with her, now he was seeing a different end game. He was saving her, but he was saving her from herself.

For the first time in weeks he felt that he was standing in the right place surrounded by the right people. The MC, his brothers, even the cuckolded boy King seemed to be an integral part in the unfolding of the story. Chibs was beginning to sense a larger purpose for his own life. He could feel his bones hardening beneath his skin, he could feel his spine becoming steel. He was stronger than he knew, his strength dependent upon his being used as a tool. If his lady needed a long sword, then he would be her tempered blade.

It was too many metaphors, he mused, looking out the window of the delivery van. But it all made sense to him. Inside his mind, inside his body, in his heart, he could feel the accuracy of all his thoughts. Things were beginning to become clear. Crystal.

Later, in the hangar, hit with the realization that she was going to be there, that she would bear witness, the rigidity of his skeleton remembered her mouth on the flesh that he was wrapped within. He stood, for a long heart-like-a-hammer moment and felt the flames she fanned inside of him, felt the baptism of her fire, no longer afraid of the phoenix struggling in the ashes.

He looked around him. King, deposed King. Subverted Queen, reluctant Queen. He wanted to go down on one knee in front of her. He wanted her to confer knighthood upon him. With conviction, he knew that he had already offered his sword to her altar.

***

They worked together on Bobby, unconscious, laid out on the kitchen table of the cabin. She had made all the adjustments necessary to being there, stilling her anxiety, quieting her fears. She worked methodical and steady because she could feel him, his energy vibrating, at her elbow. She had to restrain herself from pushing her way into his arms, laying her head on his shoulder, urging his blood-soaked hands to her face. She knew he was there, and she knew he felt the same. They had found a synchronicity that hummed between their bodies. She was amazed that no one in the room was being forced to cover their ears, keep out the sound of their silent voices calling one to the other. She could taste the sin of him in her mouth.

He was teasing her and she felt immersed in warmth and love. She smiled.

Later, her hands were full. The cotton battened proof in her pocket, the heat between her thighs for a man who was not her husband, and her estranged King lowering the drawbridge. It was all a heavy weight. She turned the lock in the door knob. She sat on the bed where Jax had been sitting. The warmth of his body memory infusing her. She shoved both hands beneath her ass, wanting to feel at the remnants of his body heat. He was just steps away from her. She stood again, moving towards the door, pressing her ear flat against the wood, listening to the voices in the front room. Chibs and Jax, their voices tangling together, winding around one another, tightening the knot that could only be cut loose, not untied.


	10. The Weight of This Heart

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Tara takes her turn watching over Bobby so that Chibs can sleep.

She was seated on the bed again, wondering if there was enough hot water for a bath or a quick shower, but loathe to walk out into the living room. The general feeling was one of malaise, the body infected systemically, raging between a babbling feverish high and a sobering nauseous low. She had worked too hard, protecting herself from the particular sickness of SAMCRO, to infect herself. Jax was Typhoid Mary and yet Filip was not. He was the Plague Doctor. She pushed the exhausted musings to the back of her mind and stood for one long aimless moment in the middle of the cabin bedroom. Then she pulled back the sheet and quilt, toed off her shoes, set her watch alarm for the next medical shift, confidant in Chibs’ attention to the patient until then, flicked off the light switch, and curled into the musty-smelling bed. She wondered, briefly, if Piney was the last person to have slept in it and that way led to migraine, so she said a small prayer for the old biker, and then she said another for Opie. And, of course, that opened her mind like an unstitched wound to more infection and she screwed her eyes shut tightly. 

She thought fleetingly of Abel and Thomas. She missed the boys so deeply that it physically hurt her to think of them. The loss of Abel in each of her rib bones, the loss of Thomas in the jutting edges of her pelvic bones. She pressed her knuckles against her eyelids and said yet another small prayer, winging it out into the universe towards Wayne and whatever guardian angels had been assigned to the small princes. But not to Gemma’s dark angel. Any thought of Gemma lately was twisting her stomach, clenching her guts, flattening her lungs. 

She lay her hands over her left breast, feeling for her own heartbeat with her fingertips, refusing to ask herself for whom it tolled. Now she was praying quietly aloud, for herself, sensing how very close she was to a darkness impenetrable to all light. _God, help me please._

Then she began a small meditation, turning onto her back, breathing through her nose, holding the air inside her chest, pushing the oxygenated blood into her extremities, forcing her spine to relax down into the old broken mattress. Her eyes closed, lashes fluttering on her cheek. If she concentreated she could hear the soft sussaration of the men’s voices in the front room. The sound lulling her, some she knew so intimately and some she knew not at all. 

She fished through her memories for something that would soothe her to sleep. With a gentle tug, she pulled a weeks' old memory of a time in Chibs’ bed to the forefront of her mind. And with an intensity she could not have expected, she was plunged into the sea of remembrance.

_She was on her back, deliciously incredibly nude. She had never been with a man who encouraged her to so much decadence. She knew that if he could shower diamonds down upon her, it would rain jewels. If he could lay her down in a bed of silk, she would be wrapped in glorious strands._

_He was standing, feeding the end of his belt through the buckle. She loved his body, and that surprised her. So different from Jackson who was all creamy skin and muscled ridges hard just beneath the surface. Filip was more than that boyish leanness. He was thicker, stronger. Solid in a way that she had never had in her arms before. The heavy weight of his skeleton discernible beneath the tattooed skin, the blackish body hair, the soft tummy. She could not stop herself from sinking her teeth into his flesh, to feel for the bone. The heavy femur, the humerus, the long sharp edge of tibia, the thick iliac spine, the lifting of the scapula, the horseshoe of his mandible. He allowed this, encouraged her to it. Sometimes she thought he wanted her to devour him._

_He had no shame or hesitation about his body, he was comfortable inside it, and he knew himself, his limits, his stamina. It was as though he were man-made, tempered and dangerous. And he was constantly handing himself to her, the loaded weapon._

_And he was encouraging her to occupy her own skin in the same way. Own it and then give it to him. She looked at him and felt hungry. Again._

_He reached down to the floor and picked up his t-shirt, he pulled it on and she watched his belly, the jumping of his biceps, the ink on his chest._

_“I want this to be more,” she said quietly. She had wanted to say it for a long time. Tattoos of other women’s names made her close her eyes with painful longing._

_He paused, pulled the shirt down over his head, and looked at her. He reached for his black button-up and fed his arms into the short sleeves. “Aye?”_

_“Yes.”_

_He stretched up on the balls of his feet, fingers laced above his head. She heard the cracking of his vertebrae and again felt the gnawing hunger for his body, his bones, his flesh._

_He sat down and fished his boots over, pulling the socks out from the insides. “Well, it can’t be, can it?”_

_“I want it to be.”_

_“Well, it fucken can’t be anything more than this, right.”_

_“Why are you so angry?” She sat up, drawing the bed sheet around her breasts, curling herself towards him. “Are you mad at me?”_

_“No, no. I’m sorry. I’m not angry with you. At all. You think I don’t want this - whatever in sweet baby jesus’s name this is - you think I don’t want this to be more? We can’t have more.”_

_“Filip.”_

_“Don’t. Just don’t.” He pulled on his socks, toed into his boots, and leaned far over to begin the tedious lacing._

_“So,” she was whispering, “what is it then? What do we have?”_

_He was shaking his head, she saw him biting his tongue. “You know what it is, Tara.”_

_“Maybe I don’t.” She dropped the sheet and straddled his lap. He looked at her, defeated, and then pulled her fast against him, rocking her in his arms._

_“Hush. You. Just hush.”_

_“No. Don’t blow me off. You tell me what you think this is. What it is for you.”_

_“What it is? It’s crazy. It’s dangerous. It’s going to end in tears or it’s going to end with someone walking away and the other person feeling like they just got gutted, bleeding out all over the fucken place. Or it’s going to end,” his voice caught in his throat. “It’s going to end unspeakably bad.”_

_Her eyes were wide. “That’s not the only way it can end.”_

_He was biting his lips, looking at her, studying her face as though memorizing the planes of it. “Tara.”_

_Slowly, he slid her out of his lap, she went like a cat, bending her knees open. His face softened, and then he smiled and shook his head. “That what you want, darlin’?”_

_She nodded. “You make me. Want things.”_

_“You make me want a helluva lot of things. I can’t have them all, though.”_

_“But you can have this.”_

_He leaned in between her thighs, eyes closed, praying hands, fingertips on his forehead, breathing in the scent of her. She watched the breadth of his shoulders, the bending of his spine. She wanted so much more from him, for them, but in these moments she forgot all the wanting and just took what he gave._

 

Her watch beeped her awake from tormented sleep. Dragging her hand out from beneath the pillow, she squinted at her wrist. Four a.m.. She was solemn at the thought of the hours passing by, the world still turning in a sea of blood. She felt far from rested, groggy and thin. She felt paper thin. She wanted to be substantial. Solid, firm, full of life. With a slight panic that she quickly tamped down by twisting her tongue between her teeth and biting hard, she wondered if she had ever been anything other than tissue.  
In the bathroom she splashed cold water on her face and it helped. A quick comb through her hair. Still surprised by its short length. She redressed in the same clothes she had shed, the fabric cold.

In the living room, Jax was asleep on his back, a forearm over his eyes. His cut a small warmth over his knees. Snoring. She shook her head and walked into the kitchen. She lit the flame under the kettle, and stilled as she heard low voices out on the porch. Filip and Juice. She set out a mug, found an old tea bag in a tin in the cupboard, sniffed it, and dropped it into the cup. Waiting on one foot for the water to boil, then taking it off the hob and pouring it into the mug. She knew there would be no milk, and with the mug in both hands, she walked out the front door. 

Juice startled but Filip smiled, too broad before schooling his expression, and nodded at her. She knew he had heard her moving around inside the cabin. He was the needle of her compass. Both men were seated on the top step of the porch, elbows on knees, looking out into the moonlit woods. Fil moved over and indicated the gap between him and Juice. She sat, still heating her hands with the hot mug of tea. Imperceptibly she pressed her elbow against his and he pressed back, all solid bone and muscle, blood warm.

“Mornin’, Doc,” he said quietly. 

Juice bent his head towards her.

“How is he? How did he do?” she asked, sipping at the tea. 

Chibs nodded. “Good. He’s good. You did a fine job. No fever, one glass of water. Last Vicodin at, oh, bout three hours ago now. He’s gotta be hungry.”

“Yes. He must. What do we have here, though? Is there any broth?”

“We’ll have to investigate the kitchen, aye.”

Juice lipped a cigarette out of a pack. 

“Do you have another one of those?” Tara asked him, leaning forward and setting the mug down on the step between her shoes.

“Sure. I didn’t know you smoked.” He handed her the pack.

“She doesn’t,” Chibs said and tugged the crumpled pack out of her hand. 

“Really?” Tara asked him, a teasing lilt in her voice.

“Really,” he nodded, tapping out a cigarette and lighting it. “Look, last one anyway. I’ll share this one with you even though these things’ll give you cancer.”

She smiled to herself and playfully leaned into him. He leaned her back to upright.

“Juan Carlos, you should be in bed,” Tara said, still teasing.

“Probably. Fresh out of beds, though. Jax is on the couch. The floor is too fucken cold.”

“Oh, that’s right. Well, please, take the bed I was in. I won’t be going back to sleep now that it’s my shift.”

“Like hell he will. That bed has my name written all over it,” Filip said and handed her the smoke. 

“You two can share,” she laughed, taking the cigarette from him, leaning back on one hand, looking up at the crescent moon and her trail of stars in the lightening sky. 

“Gotta hit the head,” Juice said, standing, flicking his butt out into the gravel walkway, a comet of sparks. He disappeared into the cabin. 

Tara laid her cheek against Chibs’ shoulder, breathing in the familiar scent of him, his leather, his skin. Swallowing it. For this one moment she allowed herself to feel content, the night fading into dawn, a world far away from Charming. She handed him the cigarette, he bent and put it between his lips, and then laced his fingers into hers. 

 

A half-hour later, Chibs lay down in the bed that Tara had slept in. He pulled the scent of her into his lungs, held it there as though he were being held under water. He closed his eyes, searching his mind for a clear spot in which he could stand while his body rested. Then Juice was in the doorway, whispering something and he forced himself to a wakefulness that filled him with resentment. But it couldn’t be helped.

“Aye. It’s fine. Just don’t spoon me you metrosexual punk.”

Juice carefully laid his body down beside him. He cleared his throat as though to speak and Chibs cut him off at once. “No, lad. Just rest quiet now. I seen you palm one of them Vicodin’s. Swallow it now like a good boy. Let it all go.”

The horrible day was behind them. The new day was bringing a fresh hell. Chibs fell into an uneasy sleep and found himself before the gods, the great scales towering above. The stones and feathers of all his sinful acts and virtuous deeds piled beside, and in his breast, the heart that would balance the weight. Heavy, heavy.


	11. Of Lion Hearts, Terrible Wolves and Sacrificial Lambs

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The Season 6 finale wrecked me. I debated staying on my canon track but I love my readers too much to put you all through that. THANK YOU - EVERY SINGLE ONE OF YOU - FOR READING AND SUPPORTING THIS RARE OTP. Thank you for loving our girl.

The burner trembled against his chest. He was on the stairs, descending into the hell that he had been leading himself into. Her voice was a whispered scream and for a moment he thought that might be his punishment; to hear her say his name, scream it aloud, plead for him while he was trapped within the foul staircase, the temporary clubhouse, surrounded by his brethren being flayed alive for their own misdeeds, eternally on their way to hunt down the mother of the princes. 

“Filip.” His name in her mouth became an absolution. He blinked away tears.

He grunted into the phone, god please hear my cries. Then he palmed the phone, his hand in the pocket of his cut. He took the last two stairs with a single jump, looked out the plate glass at the front of the shop, Jax and Alvarez and the machinations of the devil. With a quick sideways movement he turned and made his way out the back door of the ice cream parlor and into the alley.

“Tara,” he answered her. His heart had stilled almost to a stop.

Her voice hitched and he squeezed his eyes shut. There had been enough weeping to flood the river, have the Sacramento spilling over her banks. _Don’t cry, love, don’t cry._ He forced himself to speak her name again, with a calmness he didn’t feel, strength he wondered where he was going to find. 

“Canada? Alaska? Scotland?” It was a decision made. A life or death choice.

“Yes,” he answered and felt his heart leave his body and fly to her. “Where are you?” he asked and cleared his mind in order to remember what she was going to tell him. Everything else, the crying, the shaking, the fear, and the agony would have to be felt later. Right now he needed to memorize her words. “I know this is the hardest thing you have ever done. But please, darling girl. Believe me when I tell you that I’m on my way. Wait there. Don’t move. Don’t panic. I’m coming.”

He knew he would never ever tell her about Church. The sin that each one of his brothers had sworn to commit. Upon her. He felt his stomach turn over. Then he ran a quick hand over his mouth, fingers pressing hard into his scarred cheeks. He used his own hand to shake his head. Hold in the bile rising in his throat fast enough to choke him to death. He knew she was making the right choice for herself, her children. He needed to be worthy of her choice to include him in it.

He closed his eyes, tipping his head as though towards her, pressing his mouth against the phone. “Tara?”

Her voice shook, “I’m still here, Fil.”

“I love you.” The sentiment was so true, so easy to say out loud. He wondered why he had not told her it before.

They had only moments. Less than hours. Everything had led to this day, this morning that would become evening. The night that would birth the new dawn.

The Queen had called upon her Knight Errant.

***

He already had his go-bag in his saddle bags. He couldn’t wait for Jax to finish with Alvarez. Couldn’t be sucked back into the vortex that the King was spinning in. He walked back through the shop, imperceptible nod that spoke volumes. Through the front doors. Jax and Alavarez and Hap were at the far end of the block. He straddled the big Dyna, petting the glossy black tank. He took the alley, then turned through the surface streets, headed towards the freeway. The bike opened up beneath him, he hit the on ramp, twisted the throttle and she leapt forward. He didn’t even notice when he left Charming. He was looking straight ahead. 

***

She was in the doorway of the motel room, shading her eyes with her good hand, looking for him. He watched her shoulders slump, her hand lower to her mouth. She turned into the room, then turned back and he was off the bike and moving quickly towards her. She broke into a run and then she was in his arms, solid, sure, shaking. He held her until he felt he could let her go. They didn’t need to speak. In the room, he slowed down, he didn’t want to scare Abel. The boy was thrilled to see a tattooed man in the familiar cut. He tousled his hair, then reached down and swung him up high, a quick hug, before setting him down on his feet. 

She was moving efficiently, the work already done. He motioned for her phone and out on the cement stoop he stomped it to pieces, scooping them up and shoving the mess into his pocket, kicking small shards of glass off the walkway. She had Thomas in the car seat, Abel trailing her. He stepped aside and she walked to her car. He quickly cased the room, it was clean, and he locked the door and pulled it shut behind him.

Before he destroyed his own phone, he made a last call to his contact in Seattle. They would be there by the day after tomorrow. He filled in the rough approximations, himself, her, two boys. Passports, identification, new lives. He had a superstition about changing identities but this felt like metamorphosis, as though they were breaking out of old skin. He thumbed out the sim card, feeling the weight of the phone in his hand, he couldn’t wait to toss it.

At the car, he opened her door for her, spoke nonsense Gaelic to the boys until Abel giggled. She sat and he pulled her belt across her. “Be safe,” he whispered against the side of her face, into her ear, pressing his lips hungry against her cheek. She nodded. 

Then they were on the freeway. The beautiful California scenery flashing past on the straight stretch of I-5 heading out of the state. Seven hours later and they were in Oregon, and when they gassed up, he told her they were going to take highways now, the freeway was fast but too open. 

He shrugged out of the cut, stuffed it into one of the saddlebags and pulled out a black hoodie. She stocked up on animal crackers, something called go-gurts, and water. Both boys were asleep and he pressed her up against the side of the car, beside the embarrassed gas jockey, and kissed her until neither one of them could breathe without panting. The kid hung the nozzle back up and Chibs hurried him on his way with an outstretched five dollar bill.

He rolled his forehead against hers. 

“You tell me when you’re ready to stop for the night and we will.” They had bought a prepaid. “I’m going to off the bike in the morning and then we’ll be driving together. We need new plates for your car.”

She was nodding. He saw the fear wrinkled into the corners of her eyes, her mouth.

“It’s going to be alright,” he said, kissing her again. 

“I know,” she answered. 

And he followed her until she called him. He helped her carry bags and boys into the hotel room. Two queen beds and she lay Abel in one. Out on the balcony he checked his Beretta 92, one in the chamber, full clip. He needed a smoke but had forgotten to buy a fresh pack. Maybe he’d quit, he mused. Oregon was cold. Dinkwater, Oregon was quiet. He walked back into the room, shutting and locking the door. She’d left the bathroom light on and in the small illumination he studied this miracle family that now belonged to him. Abel was sleeping large in one bed. Tara was curled around Thomas in the other. She was near the edge of the mattress and after he used the facilities, he lay himself down beside her on the side nearest the door. She pushed her body back into his arms. 

“I love you, too,” she told him. 

His arms tightened around her. He pressed his lips into the nape of her neck, kissing the curving base of her skull, sucking strands of her dark hair into his mouth, nodding yes yes yes against her head.


	12. EPILOGUE

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “Do not look back. And do not dream about the future, either. It will neither give you back the past, nor satisfy your other daydreams. Your duty, your reward—your destiny—are here and now.”
> 
> ~ Dag Hammarskjold

_6 months later –_

It was a splinter in his mind. He could not yank it out and something about the itch got him hard. He wanted to simultaneously fuck someone and kill someone. Maybe the same someone. Maybe not. It was infecting his life. He would wake from dreams where his only job was to scoop an ocean of blood into buckets and carry the buckets around until his hands bled. Into the buckets. In his more lucid moments he tried to slow down and think it through, line up his emotions and the facts he knew, stand back and study the mess and have it all make sense. It never did, though. 

He had tried to tell Jax. After Jax calmed the hell down, after Jax exhausted himself for two weeks trying to sort it in his own mind. Tara and the boys gone. Chibs gone. He could see the absolute confusion on the young King’s face as he pondered the coincidence of it. And that confusion enraged him. 

They spoke of it one last time. After a ragged church. Bobby trying to hold it all together but there was nothing left to hold. The DA had made it clear that Jax was going to jail. That the MC would voluntarily stop flying colors. It was all over but the shouting. And there was so much shouting that Tig’s ears were hurting. 

Everything was hurting.

The three of them left sitting at the table. He flat-palmed the worn wood. Looked down and breathed out hard. “He’s with her. They’re together. You get that, right?”

“You keep saying it. And I’m getting tired of hearing it, Tig. Can you stop already.”

“Man, why are you so blind?” 

“Tiggy, enough,” Bobby pleaded.

“You know I’m right, don’t you?”

Bobby said nothing. Jax turned towards, him brows furrowed. “If he’s with her. And that’s a huge fucken if, then he’s protecting her, watching over her.”

Bobby and Tig locked gazes across the table. 

“That’s enough,” Bobby said. “I’m going down the block to the bar.”

Tig shook his head but followed. He finally figured it out. He was jealous.

***

_1 year later -_

Karma was a fanged bitch and she had him around the throat. He’d been down on his back with her on his chest for nearly a year. But it was almost over. He had heard the rumour mill grinding out its dark promise and he knew it wouldn't be long now. The Chinese, the Irish, black and brown. Everyone was moving towards him with knife and club, gun and shiv. They would use their bare hands if they had to. He was truly the walking dead. 

He lay back on the cell bunk. Fingers locked behind his head, staring at the stained ceiling, the cinderblock wall, and a future he could have had. A past he no longer cared to remember. And a present that ticked each minute out with the foretelling of an executioner’s tight schedule. 

The reaper was on his way.

He spun out the only comfort tale he had left. Tara and the boys, safe and smiling somewhere in the world. He had let go of the rage, the betrayal, the need for revenge months before. Who was he to behead his Queen, lock the Princes in an impenetrable tower. His reign had been brief and bloody. And ultimately without point. 

He had seen the fear and horror etched into the face of the woman he had loved above all women. He knew he was the one who carved those lines into her flesh. He screwed his eyes shut and wished all the happiness in life for each of them.

And with a wide open heart, he wished the same for Chibs.

***

_2 years later –_

His torso was a written testament to all his judgment visited upon others. All the lives he felt he had a right to end. Vengeance was a sweet addiction, and he smiled through his ruined teeth, the bleeding lips. They thought they would break him slow, but they didn’t know how hard he could ride revenge. With a roar, he wrestled free, and his last thought was a good one. He had avenged his King and now he could rest. Happy.

***

_3 years later -_

He had lost and saved one family from an insane King. He had saved this one from another but there had been losses, too. He chose to not remember the past, to think in agony of wives and daughters, brothers, fathers, sons, mothers. And it wasn’t that he had forgotten, how could he have, but rather that he simply did not hold them anymore. 

It was too heavy a weight and he had put it down. He had to put it down in order to carry these souls, protect these lives. This woman. These children. His family.

The straight path had not proven as restrictive as he would have guessed. They had managed to stay stateside. 

She had anchored him in her sea. 

His hard-won sense of calm and efficiency had been recognized quickly. He had enjoyed the hell out of driving an ambulance, and of letting others drive while he saved lives in the back of the car. But when he was offered the flight medic position on the trauma bird, he had ducked into a Catholic church on the way home, offered his confessions as though opening a vein, and kneeled in the back pew for hours with his penance.  
Somewhere he had done something or somebody right.

And now, in their bedroom, candle-lit, the two boys wide-eyed at the foot of the bed, he caught his newborn child, handed her to her mother, and crawled up beside the two of them. He opened one arm and beckoned to his sons who came, awed, into his embrace. With the other he cradled his wife, their babe. 

He cried until he’d cried enough and then he began to laugh softly in joy.

***

_4 years later -_

He saw her before she saw him. She was sitting with another wrecked woman, in the alley behind the liquor store. Shopping carts circled to protect them from the biting wind whipping between the dumpsters. He shook his head, and in the store he spent more than he had. Back outside, he shrugged his heavy shoulders beneath the cut, took a deep breath, and began the long walk towards her.

She looked up, they both did, as his booted step stopped in front of them. He hunkered down in front of her. A sad smile on his face. How did they come to this. She didn’t recognize him, or chose not to. He handed her the bag, two packs of her brand, a bottle of something cheap, and some energy bars. She pushed it back at him, her nails ragged and torn, her hand shaking.

“Take it, darling,” he said in his low gruff voice. “I want you to have it.”

She pushed the bag again. He set it down, between her knees and straightened, his own knees protesting the effort.

“Merry Christmas, Gemma.”

He still wanted to make it out to the cemetery, so he turned and walked away.

“Bobby?” she called to him. But he didn’t look back.

***

_5 years later –_

She did not look backwards and she no longer had to look over her shoulder. Each morning she thanked her god for the man who had saved her, her boys, gifted her with more children, this good life. 

She had not forgotten the past but instead allowed it to tremble into wisps of a half-remembered dream. Some mornings it haunted her for hours, other evenings she closed her eyes not wanting to dream but accepting that dreams and nightmares had shaped her. She slept in the arms of the man who had saved her, the embrace that protected her. And she woke each new day to full-mouthed kisses.

Within the safety he wrapped them so tightly in, she had become whole. In the fire that burned between them, the seed of their flower had germinated. 

She had not realized, before him, that love could be vast and freeing. He was her eternity.

***

_20 years later -_

He stood in the Charming Cemetery. It was winter but this town didn’t know the seasons in the same way the home he’d grown up in did. He thought of his mother and father, his brother and sisters. He smiled thinking of his mother’s kitchen, hot cocoa, fresh bread. His father stomping snow off his boots. His siblings. Dogs. The smell of pine trees. He was on his way home for the holidays, on leave. Still in his fatigues, having caught a hop to the Sacramento airbase, he’d taken a taxi out of the sprawling metropolis and into the unremarkable hamlet with the strangely endearing name.

He knew that this graveyard was full of sleeping ghosts and he didn’t want to wake them. But he wanted to pay his respects. He’d bought a bouquet of blood-red roses from the florist on his walk over. And he’d already laid single stem buds on so many of the monuments, engraved names familiar in a small haunting way. Grandmother, grandfathers, uncles. 

Now he was standing in front of the headstone he’d been both dreading and anticipating. He remembered this man. He was quiet with his memories, his recollections of small moments. His memories were physical things that he held in his muscles, the long bones of his legs, his fingers. 

He squatted down, then turned and sat, knees up, back against the marble. He laid the three flowers beside him on the sparse grass. He rested his forehead on his knees, emptying his mind but not allowing anything to enter and settle. He just wanted to be still for a while. 

This grave held the body of a King. He hoped he slept in peace.

**Author's Note:**

> I want to take a moment to thank each one of you. Thank you for reading. Thank you for commenting. I believe comments are the exchange between readers and fanfic writers and I totally appreciate every one of you who've taken the time to comment on this fic. It means more than you can know! 
> 
> I hope this ending finishes this fic in a way that satisfies!
> 
> Also, the title of this fic was taken from the song "Paper House" by the amazing Over The Ocean!!
> 
> I love this rare pairing. In my mind it works beautifully and I do intend to continue to write more fic in this 'ship. I have many supplemental chapters that were supposed to fit into this fic but now that's impossible. I may post them as stand alone parts of the 'verse. 
> 
> I don't think I can make peace with Sutter's decision regarding Tara. I loved the character. I identified with her. And her loss is huge.


End file.
